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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

AND THE PREPARATION 

FOR LIFE 

EIGHT TALKS ON FAMILIAR 
UNDERGRADUATE PROBLEMS 

BY 

ALBERT PARKER FITCH 

President of the Faculty of 
Andover Theological Seminary 







BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

<@f)t ftitoet?ibe pre^ Camtori&0e 

1914 






COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October IQ14 



OCT -5 1914 
©CI.A380724 






TO 

F. D. F. 

WHO IN UNWEARYING AND GENEROUS LABORS 

AND NATIVE NOBILITY OF SPIRIT 

HAS LIVED BESIDE AND FOR ME 

A BEAUTIFUL AND EFFICIENT LIFE 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/collegecoursepre01fitc 



APOLOGIA 

No man can fathom the heart of a youth. He 
who thinks he can, is, of all men, the most incom- 
petent to deal with youth's problems. But, be- 
cause I believe in youth, I know something of its 
amazing and moving manifestations. I know its 
capacity for idealism and the capacity for pain 
that often goes with it. I know the passion, at 
once the glory and the peril of youth, which 
leaps and surges in its veins, and also the poign- 
ant moral suffering that accompanies passion, as 
truly in youth as in middle age. I know that 
strange deification of sorrow, made by those 
whom sorrow has not yet really touched, and the 
heroic struggle with insurmountable obstacles 
that youth will make and love. I know the intol- 
erance, the incredible carelessness, the ruthless 
judgments, the unconscious cruelty, the trans- 
parent sophistries, the sloth of body and mind, 
the yielding to the appetites of the flesh, almost 
at the moment when rejoicing in the visions of the 
spirit, to which youth is ever prone. But, deeper 
than all this, I know that at its heart and in the 
long run, youth lives in high places and its feet 
are eager for the mountain-tops. Modesty and 

vii 



APOLOGIA 

simplicity and sincerity, a noble mixture of 
reserve and frankness, the will to do right and the 
hatred of pretense, these lie at the bottom of 
nearly every beginning life. Not infrequently the 
heart that is most merry and inconsequent is also 
most sensitive and shy. And here, I suppose, is 
the only apologia for these talks and the themes, 
most ancient yet most fresh, with which they 
deal. They are written by one who loves youth 
and reveres its problems, and thinks that to be 
young is the divinest thing in the world — by 
one who believes in the native dignity and worth 
of young human nature and sees, beneath the 
amazing and baffling inconsistencies of youth's 
life, its essential decency, its unconquerable ideal- 
ism, its shining possibilities. Whatever of value 
or insight these pages may possibly possess is due 
to that mingling of solicitude and faith which 
many of us, whose feet have walked longer upon 
this earth, feel for those who have just begun to 
tread its surface. And, surely, it is only they who 
are themselves lovers of youth who can perceive 
and understand its problems, for they alone are 
able to re-live them. Neither the preacher nor 
the patron is tolerable or valuable, for long- 
continued contact, with beginning lives. They 
seek instinctively, among their elders, for the 
comrade, older, indeed, but still eager and respon- 

viii 



APOLOGIA 

sive, one to whom the disciplines and disappoint- 
ments of added years have not brought the 
dimming of the imagination, nor the loss of the 
power to think one's self back again into the free 
and joyous morning of human life. That comrade 
I would most ardently desire to be. And hence 
these ensuing chapters, which were first spoken 
informally before the undergraduates of Wil- 
liams College, are not, I hope, essays of the didac- 
tic and moralizing sort, such as teachers and 
preachers might impose upon their passive and 
receptive hearers. They are just friendly talks of 
one man with some younger men. They are 
intended not so much to edify and instruct as to 
interpret and reveal. 

A. P. F. 

Home's Acre, 

Cornish, New Hampshire, 

15th July, 1914. 



CONTENTS 



I. Where all the Problems begin ... 1 

II. The Struggle for Personal Recognition 31 

III. The Fight for Character 62 

IV. The Religious Instinct and the Christian 
Experience 90 



V. The Exceeding Difficulties of Belief . 118 

VI. Religion and Scholarship .14$- 

VII. Is Learning Essential 175 

VIII. The Distaste for the Beautiful . . . 204 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

AND THE PREPARATION 

FOR LIFE 

CHAPTER I 

WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

They begin in the Freshman year; they are, 
indeed, an inevitable and significant portion of 
its very substance. For that year is always and 
everywhere a high adventure. It is compounded 
of delightful if terrifying uncertainties. It is the 
exploration, big with fate, which each awakening 
youth makes into the real world of his fellow 
human beings, into the real convictions, desires, 
and powers of his own soul. There still comes 
once, to every boy, even in our safe and com- 
fortable and commonplace world, a morning 
when the mystery and the thrill of the Unknown 
lay hold upon him; when the call of the undis- 
covered country is in his ears; when he knows 
that, at last, he is free to walk an untrodden path 
and to do and be what no one else has ever done 
or been before. That is the morning of the day 
when college opens, and he, once a schoolboy, 
now an undergraduate, stands, his own master, 

at his dormitory door. 

1 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

Consider a moment the background out of 
which the Freshman issues. Up to the day when 
he matriculates, his life, if it has been a normal 
and wholesome one, has been summed up in the 
terms of a mediated experience. It has been 
made for him by his parents, his teachers, or his 
friends. Religion, morals, knowledge, social 
standards, personal habits have been accepted 
on authority. They have been given and 
received. The keynote of all wholesome boy- 
hood is obedience. The schoolboy does not 
really understand life, nor, for the most part, 
does he endeavor or desire to. He just accepts 
it, taking for granted that things are as they 
appear. It may well be true that, even in the 
early boyish days, he has moments of profound 
and instinctive expectation, when the slumber- 
ing inner life stirs and tries to find its own out- 
look upon its little, ordered world. Amid the 
security and acquiescence of later childhood, 
there come, not infrequently, to sensitive and 
thoughtful boys flashes of intuitive discernment 
into the grim world beyond childhood where 
elemental forces are to grapple for possession of 
the awakening soul. But, for the most part, it 
is only a surface experience which the boy per- 
ceives, and life is known to him only in its 
accepted and accredited expressions. 

2 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

But when he comes up to college, at once a new 
world opens. Four years of unparalleled oppor- 
tunity and extraordinary stimulus are set before 
him. They contain a maximum of privilege and 
a minimum of responsibility. Above all, they 
offer to the youth spiritual and intellectual free- 
dom, the one thing which in the final days of 
schooling he did most passionately desire. The 
college deliberately releases him from the re- 
straints and traditions of a provincial and 
domestic life. His comings and goings are not 
watched. Within certain limitations his courses 
are not dictated. He is given a large measure of 
leisure and independence to use that leisure as 
he sees fit. Most significant of all, ideas and 
convictions are no longer imposed upon him 
from without. In the critical and neutral at- 
mosphere of the college classroom everything is 
questioned, nothing is taken for granted; it is 
the facts and all the facts and nothing but the 
facts which he pursues. , No longer, then, is his 
a selected and mediated experience. Nothing is 
received by him now except as he is able to see for 
himself its inherent reality and worth. Where 
and how he will, the boy touches life, as it is, 
with his own right hand. If the keynote of 
every good school is obedience, then the keynote 
of every good college is freedom, freedom to in- 

3 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

vestigate everything for one's self. The boy 
now is not merely permitted, he is expected, to 
find his own soul and his own view of life. It is 
this abrupt and radical tradition from school to 
college, a transition which, in our present Ameri- 
can system of education, is as swift and sudden 
and sharp as it well could be, which intoxicates 
the Freshman, and imparts to the first college 
year both its dangers and its splendor. 

The first thing, then, to remember, is that 
Romance begins with the day of registration. 
The absence from home, and from any real 
parental or academic scrutiny; the free and 
intimate contact with many other newly dis- 
covered fellow human beings, all of one's own 
age and sex; the sense of that opportunity for 
self-expression which accompanies independence, 
and of how the future may hang on the way to 
opportunity is employed — all these combine to 
make the Freshman year the first great essay of 
a young man's life. The expanding and explor- 
ing passion which, away back in the morning of 
the world, drove Abraham out of the familiar 
city of his fathers to seek an unknown country 
and to go out not knowing whither he went; the 
inner urge that made Ulysses sail the wine-dark 
seas even beyond the baths of all the western 
stars; the will and lift and hope with which 

4 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

Columbus paced each night his tiny vessel's poop 
and ever searched the dim horizon for he knew 
not what — something of this age-old, mascu- 
line spirit of romance and adventure every 
normal undergraduate consciously feels. Of 
course, he forgets the old. Of course, he laughs 
at the futile prudence of his elders, the shabby 
wisdom of an antique world. All his second- 
hand experience, the accepted saws, the imposed 
views drop, like the shreds of an old garment, 
from his naked passion for reality. For life is 
fresh, and he is young, and he is free, and his 
world is not quite like anybody else's, and he 
means to know it for himself. And then, too, 
running parallel with all the glamour and ro- 
mance of the college adventure, a very element of 
its charm and a part of its fascination is the 
sense of uncertainty, of perplexity, of not being 
quite sure of one's environment or one's self. 
The hope and confidence and joy are always 
mingled with questionings and self-distrust and 
fear. So that the four undergraduate years 
present an extraordinary mixture of initiative 
and timidity, courage and cowardice, sublime 
confidence, profound and real despair upon the 
student's part. Often one mood succeeds an- 
other with such bewildering and irrational 
rapidity that some men's lives in college seem 

5 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

like rudderless ships, which, unstable as the 
waters upon which they ride, are equally unable 
to excel. 

One best understands the Freshman nature, 
then, and can most intelligently predict and 
interpret its inchoate and whimsical expressions, 
if one remembers into what a vivid and trans- 
figured world it introduces the boy, a world in 
which every value is re-made, distorted, or 
enhanced as the case may be, by being bathed in 
the light that never was on sea or land. The 
stimulating of the imagination, the heightening 
of self-consciousness, the swift enlargement of 
the perceptions and ideas which academic life 
brings to an alert and sensitive youth — all 
these combine to change the very face of nature 
before his eyes. For the first time the Universe 
takes on significance and reality; he personalizes 
it, it becomes a veritable and observant Pres- 
ence; and sometimes he feels with it a mystic 
touch. That eager and uplifted look which 
dwellers in university towns so often see in the 
eyes of the incoming men, a look made up 
partly of confidence and unconscious pride, 
partly of startled questioning and doubt — 
that dawning conqueror's look often seen on the 
fresh and unworn faces of those who themselves 
have made no conquests yet — that is the sign 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

that they are coming to themselves, that they 
are finding life not forbidding and remote, but 
warm, ready, and expectant, and that they are 
gathering themselves together for the first plunge 
beneath its depths! 

So, as the background for all our discussions, 
we assume that the undergraduate's life is, for 
the most part, cast into the romantic aspect, and 
that it is with intense absorption and idealizing 
passion that he lives his four college years. 
The whole round world expresses itself for him 
in that particular assemblage of other young male 
creatures, just like, yet unlike himself, into 
which he has been cast. Into the vortex of their 
eager, springing lives he expects to be drawn. 
There reside for him the supreme values. In 
that world he means to find all the poetry and the 
friendship which the gray-haired graduates, as 
they sit about the fire, recount; all the vision 
and aspiration which college hymns and college 
songs suggest. How vital is his first plunge into 
this communal, undirected life! How instantly 
the inner man awakens to it! Then his soul, 
that which is, he, himself, begins to ask, Who am 
I, and for what came I into the world? And 
while it thus questions, it hears the world calling, 
inviting it to furthest discovery and to utmost 
conquest, saying, Come out to me, O youth! 

7 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

You and your comrades come together, and as, 
in me, you see and feel and do, so shall you know! 
Thus there re-begins, each autumn, in every 
college town, that search, the most necessary 
yet dangerous search the world has knowledge 
of — the quest of half-awakened youth for its 
own realities. This is what makes the untell- 
able romance, the apparent recklessness, the 
poignant, perilous delights of undergraduate 
days. 

It is, then, out of this situation which we have 
thus been trying to describe that all the char- 
acteristic problems of youth arise. And the first 
problem is the social one. For in college, being 
free, the boy has his initial opportunity to find 
out whether he can make a man of himself. And 
the first test of manhood is always in connection 
with one's contemporaries. What standing can 
he win with them? The first adventure is the 
search for the approbation of one's peers; the 
first problem is the problem of personal recogni- 
tion. What veritable, if temporary, tragedies 
that phrase may cover! How many shy and 
conscious lads have lived their college years in 
acutest misery, feeling that, because they had 
not attained the coveted undergraduate standing, 
they were self-confessed failures, already con- 
signed to mediocrity. The primary instinct of 

8 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

the awakening life, born of its mixture of con- 
fidence and hesitancy, is the craving for the 
support and recognition of its comrades. Their 
sanction is the first thing the average under- 
graduate desires, and, without it, no other 
sanction is sufficient. For of course his parents 
believe in him, — in a sense they must, — and 
he feels they do not see him as he is, affection 
has made them blind. Of course the college 
authorities accept him. But theirs is the general 
and official approval, which, at the beginning, 
they give to all. His real judges, therefore, must 
be his peers. There is some justice in this 
feeling, so intense in youth, that the preliminary 
condition of larger and more substantial achieve- 
ments is the winning of the confidence and 
admiration of the men of one's own genera- 
tion. 

Yet how handicapped is many a youth as he 
approaches his social problem! For he is an 
American, his life, most probably, issuing from a 
thin background. He comes up to college often 
acutely conscious of a crudity and ignorance 
which are neither supported nor concealed by 
those inherited traditions and usages which, in 
an older society, give assurance to youth and 
help it to make its start. Hence how few under- 
graduates, especially when under-classmen, really 

9 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

dare to be themselves. How often, at alumni 
reunions, one hears the remark: "Why, what a 
fine fellow Smith is ! I don't seem to have known 
him in college. How much he has developed 
since." Of course, Smith was n't known in 
college. He did n't know himself in those 
undergraduate days; he did n't dare to. The 
under-classman, such is the irony of his situation, 
tends to use his new-found freedom to become, of 
all men in the world, the expert imitator, the 
very slave of the public opinion of his peers. 
Independence of judgment, of action, even of 
dress is foreign to him. But before railing at 
him for this negative plasticity, we must remem- 
ber how naturally it grows out of the circum- 
stances of his position. We older men can 
remember the envy with which we. looked upon 
the debonair and sophisticated youth of our class, 
gay, polished, and adaptable, and how dumb we 
were in his presence. We could not possibly 
have taken toward him, in those days, the atti- 
tude commended in the terse advice I once heard 
the president of a great university give to his 
incoming Freshmen: "Avoid the so-called mag- 
netic men in your class," he said, "I have ob- 
served that they seldom amount to anything." 
No! To us such men appeared to be the very 
darlings of the gods. So there are many trage- 

10 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

dies in college, growing out of the social situa- 
tion and a part of the finding experience of youth, 
which are real enough at the time, although they 
are pathetically overestimated by the victim. 
And, before we come to discuss this whole matter 
at length, let me say just this word, in advance, 
to any boy who may read these lines. I believe 
that situation should be studied in all seriousness 
and sympathy, with as clear an apprehension of 
its present importance as of its relative insignifi- 
cance. 

Again, how intimately connected with these 
swift and radical transitions are the moral issues, 
the fights and despairs of gallant youth who 
strive to keep the body under. How utterly 
impossible it is to judge these struggles fairly or 
to approach them wisely, unless they are seen 
against the background of the tumultuous, 
expanding, and discovering period of life in which 
they take their rise. It is not merely that the 
recognition of selfhood precipitates these strug- 
gles; they are an essential part of that recogni- 
tion itself. Here is this overwhelming impact of 
life that beats in upon a sensitive, startled, 
suddenly self-conscious boy. Its stimulus is 
beyond all computation. The unsated emotions, 
the unspent energies, are aroused to their utmost 
capacities by it. The restlessness of unexpressed 

11 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

and unintelligible powers continually besets him. 
Sometimes these primitive instincts tempt him 
to deeds whose entire significance he cannot 
know. Sometimes they fasten upon him ab- 
normal or indulgent habits of body or mind when 
he is scarcely aware of what a habit is. Who, 
then, seeing a youth's mistakes, even his darker 
and more inexcusable ones, in the light of his age 
and his environment, can wholly condemn them? 
Who would marvel at the brutal, heroic, ludi- 
crous, pathetic, irrational, exasperating things 
that a hard-pressed youth will do. With what 
prodigality, sometimes, will he dull the keenest 
edge of unused sense! How he will hasten to 
bruise his feet in the ways of dark desire! He 
can do the most dreadful things at times, and 
for a time, appears to be unscathed by them. 
But we, watching each moral struggle, and 
clearly perceiving its antecedents, can scarcely 
condemn or despise him. Indeed, it may be 
questioned whether any man, until he has ceased 
to be shocked, and ceased to be scornful, over any 
expression of the life of his fellow human beings, 
has much reason to suppose that he can interpret 
them justly or influence them sincerely. At all 
events, to merely preach, here, would be entirely 
futile, and to condemn, quite despicable. For 
when we consider the reserves of unexhausted 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

emotion, the capacity for vivid imagination, the 
imperious instincts of abounding youth; and, 
when we remember that, here, ignorance of self 
and life and liberty of choice for a time go hand 
in hand, then we must surely acknowledge that 
multitudes of young men never quite understand 
their errors, and need, not so much the preacher 
or the mentor as the friend. One should never 
forget, in dealing with the moral problems of 
the undergraduate, that they are the problems of 
one who still moves about in worlds not realized. 
The one thing, therefore, which he has a right to 
expect of us, when we approach him in this field of 
his experience, is sympathy, faith, and comrade- 
ship, and not so much the imposing of sententious 
wisdom as the imparting of moral power. Nor 
should one ever forget, either, that the very 
conditions of academic life, which conditions we 
older men determine and perpetuate, and to 
which we invite and introduce the youth, are not 
entirely favorable to the best self -development. 
For all the indubitable ethical idealism of every 
college community, it nevertheless remains true 
that there is a terribly inhuman side to scholastic 
life. Many brilliant scholars and teachers ap- 
pear to youth to be compounds of fire and ice, 
glowing minds, but frigid souls! There is a sort 
of pagan and unmoral sense which sometimes 

13 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

accompanies, and appears to be fostered by, 
large intellectual powers and achievements. The 
brutal selfishness of the pupil is, not infrequently, 
quite equaled by the frank indifference and self- 
absorption of his instructor. Who that lives 
in academic communities is not often moved to 
amazement at the sublime disregard which, with 
no offer of friendly hospitality and no provision 
of more decent social opportunity, permits 
youth, night after night, to frequent the cheap 
musical shows, with their open incitement to 
vulgarity and lust. It is true that a boy must 
fight his own battles and that only a sentiment- 
alist would desire to fight them for him. It is 
true that no one can carry boys through adoles- 
cence to manhood in perambulators and that no 
decent boy would endure the experiment. But 
it is also true that when older men, who have 
come through the struggle and won their place, 
proceed to ignore the ever-continuing battle, and 
to declare its present issues no concern of theirs, 
they thereby show themselves something less 
than normal human beings. Youth is quick to 
perceive that such an irresponsible attitude 
toward the moral issues of life argues a certain 
human skepticism in him who holds it. They 
often, if unjustly, attribute it to failure in the 
past and cynical indifference as to the future. 

14 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

It is, then, demanded of us also, by our very 
humanity, that we live close to these ethical 
struggles of our younger brothers of the race. 
For in this moral world of youth, with what 
immeasureable human values, with what capacity 
for effort and suffering, do we deal ! Does it not 
make one's very heart stand still to reflect that 
within reach of us and all about us, in each day of 
the long college year, there must be young men 
who are putting forth their desperate, somber, 
half-mechanical efforts to hold these mounting, 
leaping passions until the darkness and the 
helplessness shall lessen, and something or some 
one shall give them peace. Truly, George Eliot 
was right, and expresses the natural attitude 
honest men take toward the ethical problems 
of their younger brothers, when she said: "Surely, 
surely, the only true knowledge of our fellow 
men is that which enables us to feel with them. 
Our subtlest analysis must miss the essential 
truth unless it be lit up by that love which sees 
in all forms of human thought and work the life 
and death struggles of separate human beings." 
*l And so, too, the religious problem of the under- 
graduate is only clearly or sanely seen when con- 
ceived of as largely the product of his passion to 
be free and his bewilderment in the new world of 
realities to which freedom introduces him. There 

15 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

are three quite distinct types of conventionally- 
religious youth who come up to college. There is, 
first^ the boy who identifies religion with subscrip- 
tion to creed, allegiance to formula? handed down 
by an elder generation* There are certain classic 
statements of the Christian faith. They are ma- 
jestic with the prestige of their antiquity. By 
them the fathers and the fathers' fathers have, for 
the most part, lived and died. The boy does not 
relate these creeds to the remainder of his field 
of thought. He does not understand them. 
He has no world-view into which they fit. He 
just accepts them, often with a superior and 
complacent manner which is as ludicrous as it is 
exasperating to his elders. He is a Churchman, 
a Liberal, a Conservative; and that largely sums 
up his religion. 

Then there is the boy who identifies his faith 
with pious practices, i He has been taught to 
read the Scriptures, to make his devotions, to 
keep the Sabbath, to attend church. He has 
been told there are certain things he must not 
do, and certain other things he may do. He 
conceives of wrong and right as mutually ex- 
clusive territories, localities separated by sharp 
boundary lines. Faith and righteousness, to 
him, are easily achieved by remaining in the 
right territory. So he becomes the youthful 

16 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

conformist, and though most often of sterling 

stuff, sometimes appears a most outrageous prig. 

And, finally, there is a third, brand-new type 

of youthful godliness, and a most amazing one 

3 it is to the returning graduates of two decades 
ago! The ardent if superficial humanism of our 
time has produced the youth who identifies 
religion with ethical idealism, social service, and 
administrative efficiency. He is both pious and 
popular, altruistic and athletic; he has wedded 
and made one the secular and the spiritual! 
He is a past-master at planning a missionary 
campaign, organizing a "student conference," or 
making up an attractive programme. He will 
be found teaching in the settlement house, or 
acting as scout-master for East Side gamins, or 
installed as the college Christian Association's 
secretary. Personally, he is wholly delightful; 
a most friendly and approachable chap; in all 
ways of practical usefulness and helpfulness 
amazingly able and resourceful, r But his chief 
interest, like that of many of his peers, is in 
executive tasks, "doing things"; in trying out 
his new social and economic theories; and in 
being a sort of deus ex machina for his various 
proteges. / He has character but knows little of 
religious passion, has no clear spiritual insight, nor 
is he always too well acquainted with his soul. 

17 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

These, then, are the sorts of boys, in the relig- 
ious realm, whom the forces of freedom and reali- 
ty are to mould in the plastic college years. Of 
course, therefore, all three types, if they grow 
and amount to anything in college, have their 
spiritual problems, and it is almost to be ex- 
pected that a first-rate Sophomore will be fiercely 
contemptuous of the faith! For when the 
awakening mind perceives that most of the 
inherited formulations of religion are antique in 
language and obsolete in their world-view, then, 
wherever experience has been identified with 
creed and faith with its expressions, the youth 
begins to be in trouble. If he loses the inherited 
philosophy of his religion, as he is almost sure 
to, he appears to have lost his spiritual experi- 
ence with it. Again, | one of the first things 
that an observant youth discovers is that the 
better men are, the more widely they are apt 
to differ in acceptance or rejection of pious 
practices; and that such practices themselves 
change and disappear from generation to genera- 
tion; and that saying "Lord, Lord," and keeping 
the Sabbath holy, and paying every tithe, is n't 
necessarily religion, and, often, does not proceed 
from religious motives. | Sometimes, as the youth 
perceives, the men who indulge in these things 
are far from doing justly and loving mercy and 

18 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

walking humbly with their God. It is, there- 
fore, inevitable that the life which has confused 
religion with respectability and confounded 
character with conformity, when it experiences 
its first disillusionment should naturally repudi- 
ate all traditional forms of piety and every 
venerable religious practice, and even conceive 
of all the organized expressions of Christianity 
as largely hypocrisies. Nor is it hard to deal 
with this situation when one sees it as merely 
incident to the whole difficult but precious transi- 
tion which the youth is going through in every 
department of his life. That process, here, 
should carry him out of an unvital faith which 
he has merely inherited into the power of the 
spiritual experience which he may personally 
acquire. 

But, perhaps, the problem is not so simple 
when we come to deal with our third type, the 
lad who confuses spiritual forces with their 
beneficient social expressions and identifies per- 
sonal religion with clean and amiable living. 
This new figure in the college world is hailed as 
the very champion of godliness upon the campus. 
He is the defender of the faith, drawn from the 
ranks of the indifferent, the impressive witness 
to the true revival of religion in our day. He is, 
in short, one of the overestimated, overempha- 

19 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

sized figures in the undergraduate world of the 
moment. It is one of the serious, and not 
altogether easy, tasks of the college teacher and 
preacher to arouse this life to realities, to make 
it acquainted with the exceeding difficulties of 
belief, to vex it with the problems of the origin 
and destiny of the human spirit, to reveal to 
its own helplessness, ignorance, and sin. This 
is the life that is in most danger of passing 
through the college years without being stirred 
to its depths. Certainly here the revelation of 
selfhood, and the awakening of personality, must 
mean the shaking of many amiable assurances, 
and the shattering of an unconscious complacency 
and a too-easy strength. Certainly here it is 
most needed, if the best in the life is ever to 
fulfil itself, that the revelation of self should 
lead to a veritable and subduing contact with 
that Spirit from whom all selfhood issues. 

But as we thus approach the inner life of the 
college, how unworthy appear the current mis- 
apprehensions of undergraduate religion. One 
now perceives that it is not true that the college 
is a godless place where men are encouraged to 
lose their faith. On the contrary, the college is 
fundamentally religious because it insists on the 
substance rather than the expression of spiritual 
living, and one of its most precious offices is to 

20 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

force young men to distinguish between the two. 
The influence of the American college, far from 
being unspiritual or unethical, is just the con- 
trary. There are few other places in the com- 
munity where the conditions for getting at a 
real religion are more favorable, or where, on the 
whole, it is so easy to do right and so hard to do 
wrong. And, again, it obviously is not true 
that men, in the college period of life, are natur- 
ally unbelievers, although often they themselves 
believe this to be true. It is really the passion 
for sincerity, the grim determination to get at 
reality, the sense of the surpassing importance 
of the spirit, which it is now perceived must lie 
behind the form, which induces the flippant or 
the brutal repudiations by youth of outworn 
rites and discredited conceptions. There is a 
capacity for moral indignation in the youthful 
protestant, a genuine social passion, which might 
well put his elders to the blush. Only when we 
see the religious situation in college, in the light 
of its origins, do we realize how noble is much 
of the apparently irreligious expression. Only 
then do we realize how far from being insoluble 
are the difficulties which, for thinking but in- 
experienced youth, must surround the religious 
hypothesis. Most of the spiritual struggles of 
under-graduates, therefore, should be dealt with 

21 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

as evidences of ethical sincerity, intellectual in- 
tegrity, and religious capacity. 

And if anything further were needed to prove 
the depth and reality of the spiritual influence of 
the college, it would be found in that mystical 
experience of God which comes, ever to the 
shaming and subduing of their elders, to many 
boys in their undergraduate days. For it some- 
times happens, to pure-hearted and high-minded 
youth, that the awakening of the soul is not to 
temporary disillusionment nor to racking doubts, 
but to its own self-certified vision of the Eternal. 
There are always, let us humbly and gratefully 
acknowledge, in every college class youth who 
walk softly through their free and joyous days, 
because they are conscious that God is near. 
There has been revealed to them, from within, 
what lies behind creed and rite, personal piety 
and unselfish endeavor. They have had those 
days, of which Stopford Brooke speaks some- 
where, the precious, prophetic days of youth, 
when, suddenly, without visible cause or reason, 
the life is lifted high above the Babel of existence 
and sees as from some watch-tower of the soul; 
days when youth sincerely wearies of the world, 
and work seems futile, and pleasure infinitely 
vain; days when life passes before them like the 
swift and insubstantial pageant of a dream, and 

22 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

human intercourse is far removed, and new 
voices are heard in the soul, and the eternal 
Father calls to his awakened child. 

But when we come to the intellectual problem, 
to the apparently hopeless task of making young 
scholars out of American schoolboys, we might 
appear to be upon more debatable ground. Yet 
I think the conspicuous lack of interest in in- 
tellectual matters, the failure to appreciate the 
value of pure learning, or to understand the ends 
to which it may be applied, which is so tragi- 
cally or so ludicrously apparent, according as you 
happen to view it, in the American college, is 
also chiefly to be traced to the peculiar circum- 
stances of the undergraduate's lot. Three factors, 
directly and powerfully influencing him, have 
contributed to the anomalous place of learning 
among us. 

First, the boy usually comes from a home of 
slight intellectual traditions. He heard politics 
and business and church and neighborhood gossip 
and the family's material progress discussed 
there, but almost never art or learning. The 
value of ideas, the passion for knowledge, the 
reverence for truth in the abstract, did not enter 
into that circle. When, as a schoolboy, he with- 
drew "after supper" to his Latin and mathe- 
matics, he also withdrew from the area of 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

sympathetic understanding or interest on the 
part of his elders. There was little encourage- 
ment given to him at home to consider scholar- 
ship as an essential or practical part of the life 
of a human being. It is only fair to remember, 
when dealing with a lazy Freshman, that prob- 
ably it was for social and economic reasons that 
his father sent him to college. He arrives on the 
campus with very little in the way of an intellec- 
tual inheritance. 

Again, it may well be questioned whether the 
abrupt transition from the fixed curriculum of 
the secondary school to the once almost wide- 
open elective system (happily no longer so) of 
the American college has not victimized the 
average boy. Ought we to expect him to change 
at once, with enthusiasm and fidelity, from the 
textbook and the recitation in the prescribed 
subject to the lecture and the private reading in 
the elective — especially when the cramming 
process, by which he was more or less filled up 
for his entrance examinations, could hardly in- 
crease his sense of the seriousness and worth of 
things intellectual ! He comes up, then, with the 
universal and immeasurable laziness of the 
normal young male, to the freedom of his Fresh- 
man year. He has very little background for 
an academic life, no just or idealized conception 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

of it. He is filled with the natural confusion of 
an immature and rapidly developing mind, which 
is suddenly transferred from one system of edu- 
cation to another. This confusion is enhanced 
by the multitude of distractions, quite unrelated 
to the main business of college, with which we 
permit his days to be filled. 

And then, finally, as the third factor in his 
situation, we must remember that he finds within 
the academic world itself no generally accepted 
ideal of learning. The German university stands 
for thorough and exact knowledge gained in one 
department of scholarship at almost any human 
or aesthetic cost. The English university is 
wedded to the ideal of a general culture, that 
sort of scholarship which issues in the cosmopoli- 
tan and the gentleman. But the American col- 
lege has no such widely recognized common 
standard. One great university encourages a 
highly developed individualism, directed to social 
and humane leadership. Another idealizes cor- 
porate values, producing among its students a 
magnificent esprit de corps, in which the individual 
loses himself for the sake of the common splendor 
of the whole. Some institutions foster the kind 
of learning whose commercial values can be 
readily perceived, the sorts of courses whose 
immediate utility is discernible, the scholarship 

25 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

which may be cashed. If, then, we view the 
intellectual problem of the undergraduate as we 
have viewed the others, in the light of his in- 
heritance and environment, we must expect that 
he could not issue from his preparatory school a 
full-fledged scholar, like an Athene from the 
brain of Zeus. Perhaps the gravest task that 
now confronts the American college is that of 
making an intelligent and reflective being out of 
the average collegian. But we must work at 
this on the recognized basis of his natural mis- 
conceptions and his inevitable ignorance. Per- 
haps he would not dislike scholarship if he only 
understood what it really was and how it might 
be used. It is regrettable, but not at all in- 
explicable, that the Freshman should identify the 
scholar with the scholastic, and erudition with 
pedantry. We are ourselves partly to blame 
when he sometimes conceives of the college as 
being chiefly a winter watering-place, designed 
for youth, and just touched by an academic flavor. 
While here, as elsewhere, the remedy must be 
drastic and the standards exacting, we shall not 
be just, and hence we shall not be effective, 
unless we remember that the youth has been more 
sinned against^ than sinning, and that he has 
never yet had a fair chance to discover the 
delights of intellectual discipline. If we, then, 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

approach him in a sympathetic spirit, meaning to 
lead rather than to drive, we may find an intel- 
lectual response far beyond what, in the begin- 
ning, appeared to be possible or likely. 

And this is equally true of the aesthetic prob- 
lem. When we speak of our young barbarians 
at play, as Arnold spoke of even the sophisticated 
and urbane Oxonians, do we not explain the noun 
by the adjective? Of course, they are more or 
less barbarians if they are young. A fastidious 
sense, a discriminating taste, a high and critical 
appreciation of beauty, and an acute distaste for 
ugliness, can only be acquired, unless a boy be 
born a Michael Angelo or a Keats, through long 
and varied processes. Moreover, it is once more 
true, here, that the college environment is not 
altogether favorable. Scholars, like other people, 
have their severe limitations, and their some- 
times intense provincialisms. Not infrequently 
their provincialism takes the particular form of 
an almost cultivated indifference to beauty, a 
depreciation of the aesthetic. The more modern 
departments of the college, which deal with the 
arts of music and architecture, have had to win 
their way, not without opposition, and fight for 
a just place in the curriculum. It is still not un- 
common to suspect of superficiality the youth 
who elects the fine arts, and to lay upon his 
' 27 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

instructor the burden of proof as to his own 
scholarship and solid achievement. Certainly 
our boys are sufficiently barbarian, but are we, 
most of whose college buildings are worse than 
"factories of the Muses," altogether competent 
to improve them? 

I believe it to be the bounden duty of the 
college, and the one most often neglected, to set 
up for youth aesthetic standards; to teach them 
the eternal fitness of some things, and the hideous 
unfitness of others; to make them see the aspect 
of goodness which is beauty, and the aspect of 
beauty which is truth. But this, I think, we 
shall best do as we approach the whole problem, 
with the expectation that the average American 
of one and twenty is, by the very circumstances 
of his lot, uninterested in, and incapable of appre- 
ciating, most of the myriad forms of beauty 
which lie before his very eyes. The aesthetic 
sanctions of virtue, the happy alliance between 
goodness and art, have never been greatly appre- 
ciated or believed in in our communities. I 
suppose we may thank the Puritan for that. 
Perhaps this is the reason why so many of the 
godly among us are inhuman, and so many of 
the human are ungodly! If there is a moral 
duty to be intelligent which rests upon the 
would-be developed life, then I think there is 



WHERE ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN 

equally the duty that the intelligent should be 
nobly critical and fastidious. I am inclined to 
believe that, when the aesthetic side of a youth's 
life is approached as being of as much importance 
to his manhood as his moral and intellectual 
development, then we shall do something with it. 
I hope, therefore, that there may have been 
shown in these pages, how seriously one may take 
the problems of youth, and yet, in a sense, how 
lightly one may take them, too. They are real 
and critical and painful. But they do not pro- 
ceed either from grave moral delinquency, or 
inescapable intellectual difficulties, or native 
incapacity, or spiritual dullness. I believe just 
the contrary to be true. The boy who appears 
to be a snob, and the boy who appears to be a 
stiff or a grind; the boy who appears to be ir- 
religious and profane; the boy who is incorri- 
gibly lazy and will not work; the boy who 
outrages every canon of good taste in his raiment, 
his vocabulary, and his pleasures — all these are 
not what they seem. Most of them are good 
men in the making, each, in accordance with the 
law of his own nature, passing through the 
inevitable stages of that fascinating if exasperat- 
ing process. Every word, therefore, of the 
ensuing chapters comes from one who tries to 
hit hard, because young men are so worth the 

29 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

hitting hard; but from one who always dis- 
tinguishes, in his own mind, between the sin, the 
dullness, the mistake, and the infinitely larger 
and better life which is struggling to express itself 
in these devious and blundering ways. Most of 
all I should like to make it clear that nothing is 
further from the truth than that the normal, 
older life has scant faith and interest in the 
younger ones around it. On the contrary, most 
men, who are of a decent sort, have more faith 
in such youth than they ever had in their own. 
They look wistfully to it to succeed where they 
have failed. They are convinced that there can 
be nothing in these younger lives which can be 
hopeless now. For nearly always the difficulties, 
perplexities, and mistakes may find a solution 
if they are interpreted as the natural accompani- 
ment of rapidly growing and highly stimulated 
spirits. 



CHAPTER II 

THE STRUGGLE FOR PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

We tried, in the preceding chapter, to outline 
the peculiar situation in which the undergraduate 
finds himself. He is in the midst of a quick 
transition from a mediated to an unmediated 
experience. He possesses, for the first time, 
personal and intellectual freedom. The oppor- 
tunity and the responsibility for self-expression 
have been suddenly thrust upon him. He is both 
elevated and subdued, as he realizes that the 
discovery and the testing of his manhood is at 
hand. 

Now the first test of that manhood comes in 
his relations with his classmates. His inevitable 
secret inquiry is, what will "they" think of me? 
The first instinct of the awakening life is the crav- 
ing for the support and admiration of its com- 
rades. Though many an undergraduate would 
die rather than confess it, what he most and really 
wants is popularity. The very intensity of the 
assumed indifference to undergraduate distinc- 
tions, which some men in all colleges affect, be- 
trays its artificial character. It is the covering of 
boyish pride, the armor, from the crowd, of a 

31 



^ 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

sensitive spirit, but it is rarely the sincere and 
spontaneous expression of the youth's inner life. 
Few boys, in their dreams of coming college days 
and eager anticipations of their delights, include 
social insignificance or personal unpopularity! 
If we begin, then, with the frank discussion of 
the problem of the boy's personal standing, it is 
because that problem is more or less consciously 
in his mind, even if never on his lips, during the 
four years of his college course. 

Perhaps we can most easily get at the heart of 
the problem if we try to analyze its human fac- 
tors. In most Eastern colleges, the under- 
graduate body may be easily divided into three 
distinct classes. There is, first, that group, until 
late years small in numbers, but now steadily 
increasing in both size and significance, made up 
of those who have come to college from one of the 
large and famous fitting schools. The boys in 
these private schools are, for the most part, 
drawn from one stratum of American society. 
They are come from homes of a fortunate social 
and financial inheritance. They are already 
accustomed to an easy and gracious life of wide 
human contacts and large social horizons. Most 
of them have known something of the delight 
and stimulus of foreign travel. They meet, in 
school days, boys like themselves, inheritors of 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

the same social point of view, and of much the 
same personal standards and ambitions. Now 
these boys, when they come up to college, tend 
to ally themselves with the youth of similar up- 
bringing whom they find there, because such 
youth offer immediate and easily recognized 
points of contact. This tendency of the boys 
of this group to withdraw among themselves 
means, for the most part, merely natural selec- 
tion. It seldom indicates artificial or snobbish 
standards, but, rather, that social choices are 
being made, even in these most plastic years, 
along the lines of least resistance. Such choices 
are indeed short-sighted, but they are not usually 
unworthy or vulgar. Nevertheless it comes 
about, since these youth ally themselves with 
other youth who are already like themselves, and 
whom they enjoy just because of this similarity 
of tastes and inheritance, that they form a well- 
recognized group of what might be called the 
complacent provincials of undergraduate exist- 
ence. 

Then one finds a second group in the American 
college. It is made of those boys who come out 
of that great middle class of American life, which 
forms the bone and sinew of our nation. These 
boys were fitted for college at day schools and 
academies. Most of them are the product of the 



THE COLLEGE COURSE, 

high and Latin schools of their several localities. 
They have always lived at home, therefore, daily 
trudging to and from the school building with a 
strapful of books under one arm and the tin 
lunch-box under the other. As a rule, they show 
better intellectual discipline, less personal ma- 
turity, but more scholastic conscience, than do 
they of the first group. This is not due, I take it, 
to the fact that one type of school is better than 
the other, nor does it indicate that less able boys 
are to be found in the private than in the public 
institutions. It is rather due to the fact that 
all the boys from the private school are coached 
and sent up to college, the feeble with the strong, 
while it is only the more ambitious and capable 
lads who survive the less sympathetic processes of 
the public school, or who are permitted by their 
parents, who, in their cases, are making financial 
sacrifices for them, to go on into college life. 

But, socially, the men of this second group 
are not very sophisticated. They have not had 
the advantages of boarding-school dormitory life, 
nor the opportunity, in their homes, of meeting 
naturally and pleasantly a large variety of 
people. They are, for the most part, used to 
thrifty, unostentatious, democratic ways of 
living. They often come from pious households, 
where they have been trained in the somewhat 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

rigid and external standards of a local religion. 
They are usually men of sturdy moral vigor. 
They look upon the youth of the first group, who 
live their pleasant, care-free, apparently worldly 
and abundant lives, with something of envy and 
something of disapproval. The self -conscious- 
ness, the shyness and reserve, which are char- 
acteristic of men at their period of development, 
tend to make the close and appreciative contact 
of these two groups difficult. There is between 
them a slight, if invisible, barrier. It is partly 
due, as we have been saying, to a half -unconscious 
exclusiveness, on the one hand, and shyness and 
sensitiveness, on the other. It is more due to the 
fact that both groups represent very young men 
who are not yet used to adapting themselves to 
new standards and habits and points of view. 
If we were to continue the dangerous practice of 
labeling these undergraduate bodies, perhaps we 
might call these men of the second group the 
conscientious provincials of the college. 

Finally, there is a third group in the academic 
community, and the one which, on the whole, 
interests me most of all. It is made up of those 
boys who have had no desirable social or financial 
inheritance. They have come, unaided and 
alone, right from mills and factories, machine 
shops, farms, homes of day laborers, to the col- 

35 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

lege. They have had to earn every penny which 
they have ever possessed. They have enjoyed 
their summer vacation by means of peddling 
books — dreadful, useless books, whose extor- 
tionate prices are in inverse ratio to their actual 
value! Or they have sold aluminum kitchen 
utensils, or sweated in a hay-field, or rung in 
fares on trolley-cars, or superintended the digging 
of a city ditch! They have, indeed, done any 
and every task which chance or inquiry might 
offer to their grim energy and hot ambition. 
Thus they have got together enough money to 
present themselves at the college in the fall. 
To their untutored eyes it appears to offer the 
very bread and wine of life for their eager and 
famished spirits. But these boys have no easy, 
gracious manners. They have no savoir faire. 
They do not know the accepted social patter of 
their college time or class. Usually their clothes 
don't fit, and their hair is either too short or too 
long, and their hands and feet are preternaturally 
big. They are awkward and self-conscious, and 
either tongue-tied, on the one hand, or over- 
loquacious, on the other. But they are, for the 
most part, able and determined youth, richly 
endowed with the fundamental things of mascu- 
linity, will, energy, resource, mental keenness, 
daring, and perseverance. These are the men 

36 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

who form the third characteristic group of the 
college, and they might, sometimes, be called the 
conscious and bitter provincials of the institu- 
tion. They know what hours of anxiety and 
lonely uncertainty mean. Whether or not the 
college education is worth what they have to 
pay for it is a serious question with them, for 
they pay high. They are come up for business. 
Frankly and naturally, they try to get the best, 
and as much of the best, as possible. Nor do 
they infrequently carry off the severer and more 
excellent prizes of undergraduate life. 

Up to the college, then, autumn by autumn, 
come these three groups. They all feel, to some 
degree, the elements of uncertainty, self -distrust, 
secret ambition.. All of them, in the beginning, 
move about in worlds not realized. But there is 
a general and vague opinion among them that the 
college is a democratic place. They have a sort 
of secret hope that there each of them will gain 
automatically, just by being enrolled on the books 
of the institution, the coveted measure of recog- 
nition. Every man who is a classmate will, in 
some way, be a friend and a brother. Yet they 
are not perfectly sure of this, and there is some- 
thing of challenge, and something of distrust, in 
the way in which the incoming Freshmen fur- 
tively eye one another. Nor is it altogether sur- 

37 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

prising that they are not sure of it. We have 
pretty well given up using cant in the world of 
religion, but it is still extensively employed in 
most other places, and, when we all so assidu- 
ously cultivate this idea of the democracy of the 
American college, it may be questioned as to how 
much we really believe in it ourselves. And per- 
haps, then, the first question which the incoming 
Freshman has a right to ask is what we mean when 
we talk about student-democracy, and how far 
the undergraduate body does really exemplify it. 
The first thing which the youth should under- 
stand is, that we do not mean, by democracy in 
college, a mechanical equality of recognition, 
granted to every youth merely by virtue of his 
matriculation, irrespective of his character and 
his ability. This is an impossible and senti- 
mental ideal of democracy, of which there is a 
hint in the famous phrase which eighteenth- 
century French philosophy wrote into the Dec- 
laration of Independence — that "All men are 
created equal." That phrase is untrue, on the 
face of it, in a world whose chief factor of 
progress is its inequality. It is, I think, of con- 
siderable importance, in these present days, for 
the boy in college to understand that the desire 
for such mechanical equality is now, and ever has 
been, a form of the essential vice of aristocracy, 

38 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

and that it offers no basis for real and lasting 
brotherhood. For an aristocracy means a group 
of men who are arbitrarily given fictitious stand- 
ing in the community without regard to their 
personal endowment or their social services. 
There are certain organized movements, of wide- 
spread influence to-day, which are endeavoring 
to keep the capable man down, that they may 
level the incapable man up. These movements 
are proceeding, almost exclusively, from the 
bottom of society, and are generally regarded as 
successful expressions of democracy and brother- 
hood. As a matter of fact, they are just the 
reverse. They are a new working of the aris- 
tocratic principle in its worst form. It is just as 
vicious to set up artificial equalities in the place 
of natural inequalities as it is to create artificial 
inequalities in the place of natural equalities. 
Democracy, then, either inside or outside the 
college, does not mean any arbitrary equality of 
personal standing. Here, as elsewhere, a man 
must strive for mastery! 

But what democracy does mean is equality 
of opportunity. Hence it tends to intensify 
rather than diminish human differences, just be- 
cause it gives to each man his full opportunity 
of self-expression. Whatever place, therefore, 
you hold in college will depend on yourself! The 

39 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

motto of democracy is, "A fair field and no favors 
and may the best man win." Now it would, I 
think, be untrue to assert that a college com- 
munity, even imperfectly fulfills the democratic 
ideal. But it is probably true that there is 
more of such democracy in our colleges than any- 
where else. This, indeed, we should naturally ex- 
pect for several reasons. To begin with, during 
the first three quarters of the nineteenth century 
the colleges were almost entirely recruited from the 
American public schools, where all the boys and 
girls of a community grew up in natural and 
simple association from their childhood. The 
influence of these early homogeneous and demo- 
cratic groups is still operative through various 
institutions and traditions in college life. Then, 
admission to our colleges is quite independent of 
any conditions other than those of moral and 
intellectual fitness. In a sense it may be said 
that the college is as democratic as the civil 
service; since any man may enter who has the 
minimum of character and can pass the examina- 
tions and can pay his bills. But most of all, the 
college tends to be a place of fairly even-handed 
social justice, because the principle of democracy 
is native and grateful to youth. It is well for 
all men, as they enter college, to remember that 
no normal boy, who means to keep his own self- 

40 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

respect, desires anything further from his class- 
mates than a fair chance to test out his own 
person and to display his own mettle. To a real 
but limited extent, then, the college may be 
considered a democratic community. 

But the moment one is really inside the gates, 
this democracy seems, at least, to be more 
theoretical than real. For when the boy, coming 
from any one of these three groups which we 
have described, begins his Freshman year, he 
finds the college to be a microcosm, a miniature 
world within the greater one, and very like unto 
it. There is, indeed, a generous recognition of 
worth among most college men, and an instinc- 
tive willingness to take a man on his merits and 
to ignore or despise superficial or accidental 
handicaps. Nevertheless, social politics are not 
unknown in this young men's world, special privi- 
leges have their place, personal ambitions are 
intense, pride of person and place runs high. 
What, then, is the boy to do? He knows that 
now he is not preparing for life, but, rather, that 
he is beginning life itself. He knows that the 
struggle for self-mastery, and mastery of the 
respect and allegiance of others, is not to come 
by and by, but is now upon him. He knows that 
the first test of his personal power is not academic 
and intellectual, but social. Where is he going 

41 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

to stand? Upon what plane in the college world 
is he to be found? Like every normal boy, he 
wants to get to the top. What is the fair and the 
successful way to do it? 

Well, speaking generally, there are two ways 
of winning this personal distinction in college, 
even as there are two ways outside of college. 
First, you can make social standing and personal 
popularity an end in themselves. Thus you can 
join the great army of "climbers," to use Clyde 
Fitch's expressive and repellent phrase. You can 
buy or induce a coveted place by directly utiliz- 
ing your family's social prestige, or your father's 
cash-box, or by moulding yourself servilely on the 
undergraduate opinion of the moment. Thus, of 
course, you repudiate that democracy which you 
had hoped to find and on which you had meant 
to lean. Thus you reveal that it is not the 
principle of brotherhood and equal comradeship 
which you really desire, but, rather, what you 
may perhaps gain for yourself through the opera- 
tion of that principle. Many men in college, it 
must be frankly admitted, expect to win their 
social standing by directly bidding for it. For 
this reason they run with the crowd, adapt their 
ideals and habits to the trend of the day, and 
make a sort of weather-vane of themselves, being 
always true to the current of the moment, and 

42 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

hence never true long to anything. That this 
is a real and widespread undergraduate practice 
is evidenced by the vocabulary which it has 
created. In one university such socially ambi- 
tious men are called "heelers"; in another 
"swipers"; in another, "followers." One is 
inclined to believe that this ignoble, climbing 
passion is indigenous to all middle-class life. 
That is one great reason why educated youth, 
who are elected to be leaders in our national 
existence, should set their faces against it. It is 
rather striking to recall that the two benefactors 
of this Republic, its chief stay in the beginning 
days of '76 and its savior in the worst days of '61, 
came from the two extremes of the social scale. 
One was an English gentleman, in the best sense 
an aristocrat to his finger-tips, George Washing- 
ton. The other was a son of the soil, the gaunt 
and awkward rail-splitter, Abraham Lincoln. 
Both were possessed of the sacrificial spirit. 
Both had insight, patience, courage, public- 
mindedness. Both won their place of power by 
their intrinsic worth and by the unquestioned 
value of freely rendered service. But most of us 
are members of those classes in the community 
which have left the bottom, where the stark 
realities, the immediate needs and elemental 
struggles of life, keep men kind and human, and 

43 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

have not yet reached the top, where self-interest 
no longer obscures the vision, and where in- 
herited social experience teaches men to dis- 
tinguish between real and fictitious values. 
Therefore, we tend to think more of personal 
advancement than it is worth. Is it not worth 
while to remember, at the very beginning of one's 
college course, that there are many men and 
women to whom immediate social recognition 
means more than independence, generosity, con- 
science, even honor? 

We should not, therefore, be surprised that 
not a few men, perhaps without confessing it to 
themselves, make social standing in college an end 
in itself. They attempt to reach it by ignoble 
and futile ways, upon which we must touch now 
for a moment. I spoke, in the preceding chapter, 
of the inextinguishable romance, the unconquer- 
able idealism, of college life. These things are its 
essential characteristics, but there is a sordid 
side to all this young, communal life, which we 
must acknowledge if we are to be rid of it. The 
unpleasant immaturity of the undergraduate 
nowhere more glaringly shows itself than in his 
eagerness to be known and esteemed by the 
prominent men in his class, his naive pleasure, 
when they think sufficiently of him to call him 
by some familiar name. The assiduous cultiva- 

44 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

tion of the popular and the socially successful is 
always a hateful trait, but it is doubly hateful in 
young men. The ardent, generous comrade- 
ships of youth, which are among the holiest and 
loveliest things in mortal experience, are all 
degraded when this instinct for self -advancement 
is allowed to make you disingenuous in your 
personal relationships. It is enough, to quote 
John Donne's phrase, "To make one's mind to 
chuckle, while one's heart doth ache," to observe 
some of the lads in the graduating classes of our 
preparatory schools making ready for entrance 
into the college in the ensuing autumn. One 
remembers the Scotch boys and their worship of 
the university, the austere intellectual ideals 
which it inspires, the awe with which they regard 
it, the respect which they feel for themselves as 
members of it. Then we turn to some of our 
American youth, who think of their colleges 
chiefly in the terms of the social and commercial 
opportunities which they offer. Is the college 
glorified in their minds, as the place where they 
shall know the truth and dream dreams and see 
visions and have the fountains of the great deep 
broken up within them? No, there is no such 
admixture of romance and intellectual idealism 
in their calculations. On the contrary, these 
prudential striplings debate chiefly the location 

45 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

of their academic residence, and the relative 
merit, meaning largely the amount of social 
prestige, of various fraternities. They choose 
their allegiances and activities with a view to 
desirable social propinquities and useful friend- 
ships — a rather damning word that, "useful" 
friendships ! The chief office of the college would 
appear to be to start them wisely and well on a 
social career, to be a sort of male finishing school, 
where they may get to know the right kinds of 
people! Is it likely, if you are such a lad, that 
you will ever touch the heart of your college, or 
find your own heart in it? Do you suppose that 
thus you can contribute anything precious or 
distinctive to its spirit? Is it likely that you, 
so influenced, will become a man there? Snob- 
bishness and subserviency, to the real, though 
limited, extent in which they exist in under- 
graduate bodies, are as futile as they are un- 
natural and repellent. We shall never make 
poets and heroes, prophets, scholars, scientists, 
and leaders, by any such processes. 

Wherever, therefore, the natural and innocent 
desire for social recognition assumes such abnor- 
mal proportions that it is permitted to obscure 
the sense of justice and to lessen the moral and 
personal independence of the individual, there 
results a tragic waste of human material. When- 

46 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

"ever personal advancement is made an end in 
itself, it destroys the native idealism of youth. 
You who are moved by selfish and prudential 
motives thereby lose that power of insight into 
the heights and depths of life which is the natural 
inheritance of your years. You will go through 
college never knowing or developing your own 
genius, slight in your achievement, commonplace 
and obvious in your impulses, never getting be- 
neath the surface, contented with a sort of sordid 
playing upon the crust of life. The comrade- 
ships to be prized are all born of that deeper 
awakening life which lies beneath comradeship. 
If your college friendships are shrewdly and 
skillfully manufactured; if their bonds are vul- 
gar and immediate self-interest, a lively sense of 
benefits to accrue — then they will be as super- 
ficial and impermanent as the tie which creates 
them. We all know how the world glorifies and 
surrounds with inexhaustible romance the Davids 
and Jonathans of life, the poetic friendships of 
youth with youth. We all have had our own 
secret, wistful dreams of the Emersonian friend. 
What lad, in the morning of life, has not hoped 
to gain for himself a comradeship so complete 
and intimate that for him Aristotle's definition 
should be true, and one soul should appear to 
inhabit the two bodies. Well, such friendships 

47 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

are real. They are among the supreme gifts of 
the gods. They may be had. They are the 
great and abiding relationships, surviving all 
those chances and changes of this mortal world 
which will begin the very day your college course 
shall end. But they are only possible because of 
the generous idealism, the faith, and the honor of 
youth. They are born of the absence in you 
of sordid, prudential, ungenerous calculations. 
When, while in college, you are living your best 
life for all it is worth, living it perhaps foolishly 
and recklessly, but with intensity and sincerity 
and freedom, then, in the liberation of per- 
sonality which that kind of life implies, your 
whole nature is opened up. Then deep calleth 
unto deep, and there leap from man to man the 
new fires of aroused and eager spirits, and in 
those unquenchable fires of spiritual intensity 
the lives are welded into one. 

Some one has acutely remarked that one of 
the depressing things about the social situation, 
in many undergraduate communities, is that it 
shows an immense sociability which rests back 
upon such commonplace bases. There is, among 
you all, a widespread absorption in boyish and 
trivial interests, a sort of irresponsible and un- 
intelligent levity, a restless and unrefiective 
activity, without depth or steadiness, not directed 

48 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

to large and inclusive ends. Is not this im- 
poverished social life partly the product of the 
motives which govern your social choices and of 
personal ambitions which are not always worthy 
of youth? At all events, let us be sure of this: 
the man who makes social standing in college an 
end in itself may sometimes get what he wants, 
but it is never worth the getting. For the per- 
manent and adequate satisfaction of the social 
needs and aspirations of an awakening life can 
never be found in exclusive, ungenerous, artificial 
standards and ambitions. 

But there is another way to win personal 
recognition and that confession of your value 
to the group whose natural and legitimate reward 
is social preferment. / If you want personal 
success in college, and" the rewards which follow 
from it, — and you have a perfect right to want 
them, — then remember this: those rewards are 
real, and honestly won, when they come as by- 
products. They are permanent and satisfying 
only when they are the accompaniment of an 
efficient, developed undergraduate life. Stand- 
ing is incident to worth. Place is the reward 
of value. If you succeed in being valuable, you 
will not find yourself in a corner. The trouble 
with the "climber," with the merely socially 
ambitious boy, is that he wants a place in the 

49 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

community for which he appears to have no 
solid qualifications, and that is why his position 
is precarious and his person despicable. But if 
you aim at the fullest development of the highest 
and best life that a college community might 
naturally produce, then, in so far as you attain 
that, you automatically attain honor and place 
and power. Now, that characteristic under- 
graduate development and achievement should 
be sought along two lines, the human and the 
academic. | Every good college exists for the 
express purpose of developing the humanity of 
its students and of making them into clear- 
thinking, mentally efficient persons. 1 If you are 
wise, therefore, you will expect to command the 
respect and admiration of your fellows, not by 
doing what they want, but by being to the fullest 
extent of your power what, in the long run, they 
all want to be. 

Let me explain what I mean. I have said that 
the characteristic development of life in college 
is found along two lines, the human and the 
academic. Let us take the first of these, the 
human. When the college world is regarded 
not as an arena, where one fights or schemes 
for immediate personal advancement, but as 
a frank and vigorous society to which one is 
eager to be a contributor in whose willing service 

50 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

one may hope to find one's self and place, then 
the road to the fullest and happiest development 
is clear. For then, as you face these three groups 
of men of whom we have been speaking, you 
do not value one of them at the expense of 
the others, nor try to decide into which of the 
three you will endeavor to enter, but you are 
eager to know the best that inheres in them all, 
and get your fullest development under the varied 
stimuli of each. Hence you try to be broad and 
universal in your friendships, not in order to win 
place, but in order to develop and satisfy the 
wide and varied needs of your own and your 
comrades' life. 

Never permit yourself then to draw your friends 
largely from any one group in your versatile and 
fascinating community. If you want the best 
self-development, make friends among all sorts 
and kinds of men. Choose representatives of 
every variety of youthful excellence, especially 
of those kinds of excellence in which you yourself 
are deficient. One of the chief opportunities of 
undergraduate life is the chance which it offers 
you to acquaint yourselves more or less intimately 
with a cross-section of the American life of your 
generation. And what great gifts the lad strug- 
gling up from the bottom, lifting himself by sheer 
self-initiative and ambition, has to offer the rich 

51 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

man's son, who, unfortunately, has never been 
obliged, in all his life, to drink the cup of effort 
to its dregs. 

I remember a characteristic passage touching 
on this point, in the autobiography of Nathaniel 
Southgate Shaler, long the beloved and pic- 
turesque dean of the Lawrence Scientific School 
in Harvard University. He says: "Here let me 
turn aside for a word concerning the grim aspect 
of our so-called education, which makes it well- 
nigh impossible for our youth of the higher 
classes to have any intimate contacts with men 
who may teach him what is the real nature of his 
kind. He sees those only who are so formalized 
by training and the uses of society that they show 
him a work of art in human shape. He thus has 
to deal with his fellows in terms which are not 
those of real human nature, and thereby much 
of his own is never awakened. He may live 
through long, fair-appearing years, yet fail to 
have the experience necessary to humanize him 
fully. I have known many an ignorant sailor or 
backwoodsman who, because he had been brought 
into sympathetic contact with the primitive 
qualities of his kind, was humanely a better 
educated man than those who pride themselves 
on their culture. The gravest problem of civili- 
zation is, in my opinion, how to teach human 

52 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

quality in a system which tends ever more and 
more to hide it." 

Now human quality is just what you may 
learn, if you will, in the varied society and the 
relative democracy of the college life. Choose 
your friends, then, no matter in what group acci- 
dent has placed you, among the men who in 
inheritance and environment and equipment are 
unlike yourselves. Let them be not your counter 
parts, but your complements. The gilded youth 
has no idea of the delight and satisfaction to be 
found in close association with the boy in whom 
poverty and struggle have braced the will, 
sharpened the senses, made vivid the imagina- 
tion; and, is it not also beautiful to contemplate, 
the son of fortune who thus admires the elemental 
virility of his simpler comrade, has no idea of 
how much he has to contribute to him. 

Here, then, is the first step toward a worthy 
and stable social recognition. Be generous and 
cosmopolitan in your friendships, and be thank- 
ful for the extraordinary opportunity for that 
kind of friendships which the American college 
offers. Never has there been a time when that 
word of advice could be more justly given to 
our undergraduates than now. For the temper 
of our national life is increasingly that of a 
world-citizenship. International relations of all 

53 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

sorts, commercial, diplomatic, scientific, literary, 
and religious, are drawing men together into a 
conscious and welcomed unity. Modern meth- 
ods of transportation, the celerity and ease of 
oral and written communication, contribute to 
this sense of world-relationship. The mind that 
to-day is only aware of local interests, narrow 
and traditional standards, is increasingly out of 
place. The unadaptable, untraveled sense, ac- 
customed to associate reality and worth only 
with the immediate, the certified, and the 
familiar, is increasingly obsolete. Artificial and 
ungenerous personal standards, therefore, are 
rapidly disappearing, and the social provincial is 
really an anachronism. One of the significant 
aspects of the present American life is the nation's 
awareness, as a nation, of the world and its 
relationship to the world. The race-vision has 
come into its own, and begun to play its part in 
business, diplomacy, education, and religion. 
Nearly every note in the art, literature, and 
drama of the moment presupposes and com- 
mends the widest sophistication. | You would do 
well, then, to begin now on the splendid task of 
making yourselves, in the fine sense, citizens of 
the world, open and appreciative in your attitude 
toward all other human beings and devoid of 
petty social prejudices. For the first step to- 

54 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

ward that full development, whose accompani- 
ment is the coveted personal recognition, is the 
choosing of your friends on the basis of their 
varied and intrinsic worth as men, irrespective 
of station, clothes, manners, or their present 
stage of sophistication, j Believe me, nothing is 
more certain to bring, fioth now and in the future, 
the just esteem of your fellows, influence and 
recognition among them, than a wide and gener- 
ous acquaintanceship with your own generation, 
a magnanimous and appreciative approach to 
all other men. If you have this wide and gener- 
ous humanity, exercising toward those with 
whom you live and whom you meet a sincere and 
positive personal interest, almost any and every 
other deficiency will count for little. 

And, surely, in the light of what we have just 
been saying both the possibilities and the perils 
of the fraternity system are clear. The fra- 
ternity is not necessarily an undemocratic in- 
stitution. Wherever bodies of young men have 
been gathered together more or less permanently, 
they have tended to separate into groups based 
upon kindred tastes, aims, and interests. This 
was true in the days of the mediaeval university, 
where students divided into so-called "nations," 
drawn together by ties of race or clan. It is seen 
in the "Studenten corps" of the German uni- 

55 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

versity, in the Common rooms of Oxford and 
Cambridge. With us, such groups take, in most 
colleges, the form of Greek letter fraternities. 
The charters of these college clubs embody high 
if vague ideals, and their so-called secrecy, to-day 
more apparent than real, appeals mightily to the 
adolescent mind, and is probably a helpful factor 
in the fraternity life. 

But it is only through wide and inclusive 
choice of contrasted types of excellence that fra- 
ternity life can be kept wholesome and can be 
made an aid, not a detriment, to the best self- 
development. Wherever a man's friendships are 
limited to his Chapter, he misses precious oppor- 
tunities. Wherever his interests in the fraternity 
are selfish and immediate, rather than generous 
and social; wherever the fraternity is conceived 
of as existing off the college, not living for it; 
and wherever this cosmopolitan and democratic 
ideal does not act as an important principle of 
selection in choosing its members — there the 
fraternity is a detriment in the personal life of 
the youth whose social development it thus 
restricts to narrow and conventional lines, and 
there it is a detriment also to the college whose 
esprit de corps it thus diminishes. It is of im- 
portance, I think, quite as much for fraternity 
men as for the "neutrals," that there be cordial 

56 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

cooperation and much mingling between the two 
groups. It is also important that fraternity 
membership be not considered as an end in itself, 
but as offering a prized opportunity for furthering 
the human and social welfare of the entire college. 
It is always depressing to see a young man strive 
hard to make himself worthy of a certain coveted 
fraternity or club in his college, and then to see 
him, when he has made the club, stop, lie down 
in it, so to speak, and feel that there is nothing 
more for him to do. When this is true, it would 
have been better for him and for the college and 
for the society if he had never heard of it. 

Here, then, is one honorable and effective way 
in which a wise youth attains personal recogni- 
tion. He does not strive for it as if it were an 
end invaluable in itself, but he deliberately de- 
velops in college wide, generous, simple human 
contacts. His aim is the fullest self-expression, 
rather than any particular standing as the reward 
of that expression. But the very humanity 
which he gains by these wide contacts becomes 
his chief social asset. 

And, secondly, there is another direct way 
which contributes surely and honorably to the 
personal standing of the undergraduate, namely, 
the academic. This means doing well in your 
four years the thing that you were sent to college 

57 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

to do, cultivating your own intellectual power, 
and serving the college in some characteristic 
academic way. For it is true of undergraduate 
life, just as it is true of all life, that in the long 
run men are recognized on the basis of merit. 
It is also true that eventually that is conceived 
of as being most meritorious which is most in 
keeping with the central and abiding purpose of 
the institution. Now, your institution exists to 
awaken and develop mental power. If, then, 
you can learn to do some one thing well along 
literary, dramatic, scientific, scholastic lines, 
that will bring you the respect and attention of 
your peers. 

Therefore, were I a Freshman entering college 
to-day, I should not merely make it my business 
to be catholic in my friendships and utilize all the 
common, human opportunities of undergraduate 
life. I should also set to work to develop every 
ounce of intellectual power, and to exercise every 
particle of mental energy, which I possessed. 
So that before my sophomore year was ended I 
should be able to say, "I can do something definite 
with my mind, and I can already do it pretty 
well." Most of you are obsessed with the passion 
for athletics, and intoxicated by the spectacular 
prominence which the athlete gains. But in the 
nature of the case, such prominence can only 

58 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

come to a very few, and for most of them it is a 
very doubtful blessing. You fail to realize the 
social power, the personal prestige, which accom- 
pany solid and severe achievements. If, in any 
one of the half-dozen departments of intellectual 
activity, you find that through some natural 
aptitude you can make a definite contribution to 
the common intellectual good, focus your serious 
energy and attention there. Do not do this 
primarily to the end of personal preferment. Do 
it for the enrichment and advancement of your 
college, and for the satisfying of your own in- 
tellectual self-respect. But you will certainly 
find, that, in just so far as you can really show 
yourself, in any department of learning, some- 
thing of a scholar and a thinker, in just so far the 
coveted personal recognition and standing will 
begin to come. No man who really becomes 
the friend of his generation and a genuine 
contributor to the intellectual values of his 
time need fear that he will be obscured or 
misunderstood or forgotten. When a nation, 
or an institution, have a serious task on 
hand, they invariably resort to the democratic 
principle in choosing their leaders. That is, 
they value men, then, for their actual powers 
and their solid attainment. He who can is 
then king. Developed personality and disci- 

59 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

plined powers are then the guaranties of 
leadership. X 

So, if you want social standing and personal 
recognition, they will come, not when you 
directly bid for them, but when you largely forget 
all about them, and strive for those bigger things 
the reward of whose achievement, the effect of 
whose attainment, is the respect and honor of 
your fellow men. It would be well for every 
Freshman if he could have written up over the 
door of his room, where each day of his fateful 
beginning year it would meet his eyes, "College 
life" is never valuable or real when it is separated 
from college work. 

It is true that the college fosters, and with 
entire propriety, social and athletic interests and 
activities. But the college does not exist for 
these things. It exists chiefly for humane learn- 
ing, for self -development through scholarship. It 
exists to reveal and commend a sane and thorough 
intellectual approach to manhood. Without 
scholarship, the reason for the existence of the 
college disappears. Excellence in the character- 
istic field of the college, then, means excellence 
in learning. Excellence in learning, therefore, 
is a chief means to excellence in undergraduate 
manhood. The best man in college is always 
he who best fulfills the purpose of the institu- 

60 



PERSONAL RECOGNITION 

tion of which he is a member. You were sent 
up to your Alma Mater to do two things — to 
become a man and a scholar. If you are both a 
man and a scholar, your standing in any aca- 
demic community is assured. 



CHAPTER III 

THE FIGHT FOR CHARACTER 

In a once highly valued and now largely for- 
gotten book, which contains some of the most 
perfect examples of condensed and dramatic nar- 
ration which our race has produced, there is the 
tale of the tragic end which befell a king, who 
was the founder of a dynasty and the first 
monarch of his nation. The record reads: "the 
Philistines fought against Israel, and the men 
of Israel fled from before the Philistines and 
fell down slain in Mount Gilboa. And the battle 
went sore against Saul, and the archers hit him, 
and he was sore wounded of the archers. Then 
said Saul unto his armor-bearer, Draw thy sword 
and thrust me through therewith, lest these 
uncircumcised come and thrust me through and 
abuse me. But his armor-bearer would not, for 
he was sore afraid. Therefore Saul took a sword 
and fell upon it." Thus, says the tale, there 
perished, by his own hand, one who had been 
called to be a king, and the sword, which was the 
insignia of his rank and the instrument of regal 
opportunity, became his implement of self- 
destruction. 



THE FIGHT FOR CHARACTER 

Now it is not without design that we recall 
this ancient tale at the beginning of this chapter. 
It would be impossible to write a series of talks 
on undergraduate problems without giving a 
central and significant place in them to the moral 
struggles of youth. For the college stands for 
the development of character. The salient dis- 
tinction between the college and the graduate 
school is that the first aims at the development of 
the whole nature through intellectual and hu- 
mane discipline, while the second takes a selected 
group, to whom the college has given the pre- 
pared mind and the matured person, and adds 
to their cultivation, erudition. It is because we 
believe a man to be more important than a 
scholar that we think the college to be more 
important than a graduate school. The creation 
of manhood, then, through intellectual and moral 
discipline is the significant task of the institution. 
Therefore the problems of self-control in youth 
must occupy some large share of the attention, 
both of those who teach and those who are taught 
in it. 

For manhood may be summed up in terms 
of self-mastery. The achievement of manhood 
means, very largely, the discovery and libera- 
tion of moral power; the coordination, under 
a disciplined and intelligent will, of the physi- 

63 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

cal appetites, the mental capacities, the spiri- 
tual hungers, of the individual. Such personal 
power most normal men ardently desire. The 
imperious or the imperial strain runs in most 
masculine veins. Therefore this discovery and 
development of personality, which is so inti- 
mately bound up with character, is perhaps the 
most precious, as it is the most difficult, office of 
the college. I say difficult, because it is so closely 
connected with the personal life and with self- 
control in the intimate realms of physical desire 
and sensuous delight. Any man who is ambitious 
for his future, who desires, in his brief moment 
of time and space, to play some significant part 
on the world's stage; any man who, in his secret 
dreams, prefigures his life to come, out in the 
distant hurly-burly of the world, as something 
that is to be apart and notable ;\ any such man 
would do well to begin by remembering that the 
highest forms of personal power are, at the 
bottom, moral; that control of desire precedes 
control of self; and that control of self precedes 
control of men. 

And, as we approach the moral problem of 
youth, which we thus see to be the problem of 
personal power, we come to it both with a sym- 
pathy and with a solicitude unlike that which we 
bring to any other human perplexity. For the 

64 



THE FIGHT FOR CHARACTER 

worst in men, in this moral realm, is as a darkened 
mirror, which obscurely shadows forth the out- 
line of their best. The tragedy of the spoiled 
and beaten lives in youth exactly parallels the 
tragedy of Saul. These lives have become what 
they are because the very instruments of their 
opportunity have been turned into implements 
of self-destruction. For youthful vices are chiefly 
the perversions of virtues, the abuse of excellen- 
cies. They represent, for the most part, not 
forbidden and unlawful tendencies, but, rather, 
the highest and most valuable instincts and 
capacities of the race, abandoned to license, and 
directed to forbidden or unworthy uses. It 
should never be forgotten, and, it is always well 
for youth to understand, that the intensity of 
the natural hungers and desires of a man's life 
is usually in direct proportion to his personal 
capacity. These very instincts, if honored and 
controlled, are the shining instruments of his 
destiny. But if, instead of being revered and 
conserved, they are dishonored and exploited, 
their motor impulses wasted on trivial or per- 
verse or sensual ends, then they become the 
consumers and ravagers of life, and the accelera- 
tions of irremediable disaster. 

This is well illustrated in one of the common 
undergraduate vices, that of gambling. The 

65 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

innate love of taking a chance is one of the most 
valuable instincts in our sex. It is that love of 
high risks, that lure of the uncertain outcome, 
that fascination of the unknown, which has given 
to the race its explorers, its frontiersmen, its mili- 
tary and political leaders, even its prophets in 
science and ethics and religion. When expressed 
and satisfied in such kinds of lives, the love of 
taking a chance is a high trait of great social 
value. For it is then utilized for honorable, 
imaginative, socially valuable ends. But the 
youth who will spend an afternoon or evening 
shuffling and dealing and playing cards for stakes 
is giving to that fundamental and honorable 
instinct a trivial expression and an unworthy use. 
This is why gambling is fundamentally indefen- 
sible. The pity and the wrong of it is that so 
high a trait should have so inconsequent an 
expression. Money is power. To risk money 
for no large end is to waste power. To waste 
power is an economic and moral misdemeanor. 
I had occasion, not long ago, to visit a 
room in one of the ancient dormitories of my 
own college. It is a hall in whose chambers, 
for two centuries, the greater sons of the college 
have lived, and from whose portals they have 
issued, like sons of the morning, to play their 
parts in their day and generation. As I passed 

66 



THE FIGHT FOR CHARACTER 

through the entry, the door to one of these 
historic apartments stood open. The room with- 
in was smoke-filled and close. A group of youth, 
of a rather loose and unbuttoned appearance, 
were lounging about a table, noisy of speech, and 
vulgar in posture, playing for some trivial stake 
at cards. Two hours later, on reentering the 
building, I saw the same group, still engaged in 
their severe and elevating occupation, and, as I 
passed the door, one young vulgarian flung his 
trump upon the table, coupling with the gesture 
the name of the Galilean. Outside was a clear 
and glorious winter afternoon, the untrodden 
snow inviting to the hills. A hundred paces 
away was a great university library, like that of 
Alexandria of old, offering the sifted treasure of 
the feeling and thinking of our race. In cage 
and gymnasium were a thousand opportunities 
and incentives for masculine exercise and sport. 
Living all about the room were a great com- 
pany of men and youth seeking the high and 
gracious things of life. But. these striplings, sent 
up to the college to become university men, 
trusted and endowed by its company of scholars 
with freedom and with leisure, could only imitate 
the grooms of the stable who while away a vacant 
hour by matching coins with curses in the 
harness-room. Here, then, was a sordid and 

67 






THE; COLLEGE COURSE 

vulgar abuse of fundamental instinct. Here was 
a careless wasting of that rarest and most precious 
thing in American life — leisure. Here was a 
playing with power. We all honor the adven- 
turing instinct. You will need all you have of 
it to meet gallantly the strifes and uncertainties 
of mature existence. Conserve and strengthen 
it, then, by serious exercises toward great ends. 
Do not exploit and dissipate it. The love of 
risk, controlled and developed by being directed 
to moral and humane purposes, will make a man 
of you. But this same instinct, degraded to the 
risking of money, and that for no real end, except 
the whiling away of time, or the covert and dis- 
honest hope that thereby you may get something 
for nothing, will become for you not an instru- 
ment of power, but an accelerator of disaster. 
Let us all glory in the daring and the fearless 
spirit. Let us cultivate the love of risks that 
are risks. Let them make a Ulysses, a Balboa, 
a Darwin, a Marconi, a Grenfell, out of you. 
Let them make you into a hero, not degrade you 
into a gamester. 

And the same thing is true of the youth who 
has habituated himself to seeking pleasure in the 
use of intoxicating drinks. Drunkenness, to 
speak in plain and bitter English, is also, to some 
extent, an undergraduate vice. I have no con- 



THE FIGHT FOR CHARACTER 

cern just now with the question as to whether 
there is any actual food to be derived from the 
use of alcohol. For that is not a matter of 
opinion, but of fact. And surely none, even the 
most casual of you, can be ignorant of what the 
facts are. But I should like to again remind 
you that the very genius of youth, its character- 
istic excellencies, are degraded and wasted, even 
repudiated, when, at your age, you confess that 
intoxicants are indispensable to personal en- 
joyment. It is only abnormal and defective 
youth who might be expected to crave such 
stimulants. For you are beginners, you have 
your unsated emotions, your unspent physical 
and nervous energy, the enormous capacity for 
natural and simple pleasures which belongs to 
the morning of a human life. Physical vigor, 
intellectual freshness, spiritual sensitiveness, 
which are the native attributes of youth, require 
no artificial stimuli. Hence, every time you 
turn to extreme and artificial pleasures and 
stimulations, you betray your own youth, and 
confess that you are prematurely old. Is it not 
rather humiliating, for a young male in his late 
teens or early twenties, to have to acknowledge 
that there is so little red blood and reserve nerve 
force in him that he really cannot enjoy his 
existence without imbibing enough alcohol to 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

quicken his heart action and pump abnormal 
quantities of blood into his brain? I can con- 
ceive, although I would rather die than come to 
it, that there is some excuse for our elders, they 
who are old, worn, perhaps blase and disillu- 
sioned, they who have lost the gifts of the gods, 
and must now be whipped up to their pleasures, 
when they depend upon artificial stimuli. But 
does not a man who stands untried and unspent 
on the threshold of his life feel that he owes it 
to his very youth and that inner self whose 
guardian he is, and whose testing has not yet 
been made, that he does not descend to the 
whips and spurs which the old and the broken- 
down and the worn-out have to use before they 
can make life tolerable? To do that means the 
confession of premature failure. The drinking 
youth tacitly admits that he is willing to lose the 
race before he has ever begun to run. 

The struggle for self-control in this matter of 
physical appetite, then, is not an arbitrary 
obligation imposed upon you from without by 
pious parents or meddling deans or ecclesiastical 
organizations. It is an obligation of your own 
being. In every age of the world it has been 
characteristic of the truly masculine spirit that 
it has preferred and chosen a frugal, almost 
austere, living and environment. It was the 

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THE FIGHT FOR CHARACTER 

Duke of Wellington, was it not? who all his life 
would sleep upon his soldier's pallet? This ten- 
dency in men is largely due to their realization 
that indulgence softens and vulgarizes the in- 
dividual. Now, surely you are ambitious. Of 
what use to be born a man if you do not mean to 
serve and lead? But the price of your coveted 
power is concentration of will and mind and 
desire on simple, sober, and exacting things. 
You see, then, why society quite justly condemns 
drunkenness as a vice. It is a vice because it is 
self-inflicted injury. 

And so we come to the central moral strife 
which, in one form or another, is eternally waging 
in the heart of youth. It issues out of the im- 
perious sex impulses, out of the ever-new, ever- 
mysterious relation of a man to a maid. There 
are many ways in which the world tries to help 
youth to control and victory in these, the most 
intimate, most desperate and significant of his 
conflicts. And most of these ways are futile, 
because they are prudential and commercial. 
And prudential and commercial motives can 
make small headway against the hungry, mount- 
ing desires of inexperienced and unexhausted lives. 
When one is dealing with able and promising 
youth, of large potential capacity, of how much 
use is it to warn them that to walk the primrose 

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path of dalliance does n't pay, that the physical 
risk and the nervous exhaustion are too certain 
and too great? I remember listening, as an 
undergraduate, to a "medical lecture," given by 
authority to my classmates and myself. I re- 
member that it filled me with physical and mental 
nausea. I learned some things from it, not so 
very many, that I did n't know and did n't want 
to know. I thought then, and I think now, that 
detailed physiological and pathological informa- 
tion on sex matters, related to youth in public 
meetings, is a grave mistake. I am sure there 
will always be some youth who will regard it as 
a personal insult. Knowledge of all these things 
will not keep a worth-while boy from wrong- 
doing. Timid and prudential considerations are 
only operative with timid and prudential people. 
They may act as secondary, cumulative, deter- 
rents, or they may show one how to endeavor to 
sin with impunity. The natural safeguard against 
these sorts of vices is modesty, and profound, 
innate distaste of them. There are impenetrable 
and proud reserves which are a native heritage 
of well-bred, masculine youth. To break down 
these reserves is a brutal and an indecent thing. 
The natural help to self-control is a youth's own 
sense, if his elders will let him keep it, of the 
sacredness and mystery of natural processes. 

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THE FIGHT FOR CHARACTER 

That knowledge of his self, and the perils and 
possibilities that attend the awakening of self, 
which the father imparts to his son may be 
carried as a precious talisman through the 
storms and the fights of youth. The revelation 
of a father's comradeship and a father's under- 
standing, the meeting of parent and child on the 
inner and sacred ground of their common being, 
the intimate and tender instruction received 
from the nearest and the holiest lives we know, 
this will fortify youth as will nothing else 
against degrading and impure practices. But 
the sex hysteria, still raging in this country, is 
only explaining vice by way of exploiting it. It 
is so intermixed with commercial motives, mor- 
bid sentimentalism, and semi-salacious curiosijy, 
as to be chiefly abhorrent to a well-bred, high- 
minded youth. 

Yet just such youth must battle with the 
fiercest of these temptations, nor will commercial 
virtue, nor fear of physical consequence, nor the 
threat of public opinion, nor a merely inherited 
morality, suffice to carry them through their 
fight. It is one of the moving paradoxes of the 
moral life that it is most often the ablest, finest 
and most sensitive spirits who must, with grim 
intensity, wage the fiercest battle to gain the 
captaincy of their lives. There is a little verse 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

among the published writings of John Henry 
Newman, he of the delicate nervous organism, 
he who was a mystic, a scholar, and a saint, which 
bears pathetic witness to the lots of thousands of 
his fellow human beings: 

"O, Holy Lord, who with the children three 

Didst walk the piercing flame; 
Help, in those trial hours which, save to Thee, 

I dare not name; 
Nor let these quivering eyes and sickening heart 

Crumble to dust beneath the tempter's dart. 

"Thou who didst once Thy life from Mary's breast 

Renew from day to day; 

O might her smile, severely sweet, but rest 
On this frail clay! 
Till I am thine with my whole soul, and fear 

Not feel, a secret joy, that Hell is near." 

Now, obviously, if we are to talk of the moral 
struggle, to men who know what the experience 
is which these lines indicate, then the talk must 
be lifted far above physical processes and semi- 
professional advices. For the youth who battles 
hardest with sex temptations is precisely he 
who is well aware of the moral indefensibleness 
and the physical peril of his position. But these 
lesser and secondary considerations are inopera- 
tive in his case. He cannot be sufficiently moved 

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THE FIGHT FOR CHARACTER 

by the abstract appeal to prudence, or right, or 
good sense. In place of all this, what most 
youth need to help them in these fights is an 
appeal to their holiest imagination, to their 
deepest and tenderest instincts. They need not 
the condemning, but the glorifying, of these 
desires which threaten to destroy them. We 
should be wise enough to give a man a vision of 
the power with which a controlled and conserved 
desire will endue him. To these lads who, it 
moves us to remember, have had as yet not one 
of the essential experiences of human life, we 
should present the future, and make them see 
what precious and significant satisfactions of 
their natures await them there. Above all, we 
should try to show them that it is in these very 
instincts, when they are controlled and honor- 
ably satisfied, that leadership and worth them- 
selves reside. Few men can successfully repress 
their natures. But a man may so revere his 
nature that in his high regard for it, and for its 
largest uses, he will control and subdue it. 
Youth best fights the sins of the flesh, not by 
hating the instincts which underlie them, nor 
by being ashamed of those instincts, but by so 
prizing them that he refuses to drag them in 
the mire of unbridled practices. 

In short, the initial thesis of this chapter is 
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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

markedly true in this area of the moral conflict. 
Here, of all places, sins are to be clearly dis- 
tinguished from those excellencies of which they 
are the perversions. Vice is vice here, because 
it is the abuse of virtue. It rests with you 
whether all the awakening forces of your lives, 
proudly acknowledged and honored by you, shall 
be the instruments of your coming opportunity. 
If they are not that, they are certain to be the 
implements of self-destruction. But surely all 
of us have high and daring ambitions. We 
mean both to give and receive honor from our 
fellow men; therefore we propose to first honor 
ourselves. Surely this is the word for the 
promising lives who are weary and disheartened 
with the battle against sex temptations. You 
must so prize and exalt the forces and hungers 
within you, to which these temptations are wit- 
nesses; you must be so certain that these very 
imperious desires are among the chief and noblest 
assets of your life, that therefore you cannot 
exploit or dissipate them now. And may I hold 
up before you, for the remaking of that high 
vision, four great lines of power, four avenues 
of influence, which self-control in these matters 
opens up to you, but which the lack of self- 
control automatically closes.. 

First: The obvious foundation of all real 
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THE FIGHT FOR CHARACTER 

personal power is self-respect. But it is certain 
that he who surrenders to these temptations 
despises himself. True, he may disguise by 
ingenious sophistries the nature of his deeds. 
No one is better versed than the self-indulgent 
boy in making his mind, not his friend, but his 
accomplice. But beneath all the specious reason- 
ing and self-deceit, there is always the protesting 
cry of his own nature, the shame and sorrow of 
his own soul. Inevitably, therefore, in such 
moral surrender he gradually breaks down his 
self-respect. Whether or not the things he does 
are known to any one but himself is quite im- 
material. The dreadful and the damning thing 
is that he knows that he does them. Whenever 
men dishonor their bodies by grave abuses; 
whenever, for the sake of a moment of nervous 
ecstasy, they divide the inner Kingdom of Life 
against itself and outrage their own souls, they 
thereby shatter their very personality. When- 
ever a man will give himself up to indiscriminate 
and common usage, he becomes as contemptible 
as the hideous vulgarity of his practices. When- 
ever a man, obsessed by passion, will expose the 
most intimate sanctities of his person to any 
chance stranger whom he can hire with a few 
dollars to permit him to do so, the effect upon 
self -faith and the disintegration of personal power 

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are appalling. Whenever men are willing to 
offer the very secrets of their being to another 
human life with which they have no previous 
acquaintance, with which they have nothing in 
common, except the quickly recognized bond of 
their mutual secret lust, then they cannot expect 
either to believe very much in themselves or to 
be able to inspire confidence in others. The 
agonies of remorse and contrition into which 
youth react from these unbridled practices are 
the clearest indication of their devastating and 
consuming effect upon the will and spirit. They 
make sincerity of personality impossible, and 
with sincerity is relinquished power. For what 
life is more futile than that which is distracted 
within by the dissipations without? The loftiest 
form of power is character. " What you are 
speaks so loud, men cannot hear what you say." 
The first condition of character is self-respect, 
without which there is no basis for character. 
And, we may add, for you who stumble and grow 
weary, and are quite discouraged in the fight, 
that character brings, so soon as you begin to 
achieve it, its own exceeding sweet reward, a 
reward that is more than a recompense for all 
the darkness and helplessness and shame which 
lie behind. Few experiences of expanding youth 
are more precious than the first conscious 

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dawning of the sense of self-control, the growing 
experience of moral mastery. This experience 
the youth carries out with him, into the long 
succession of his gradually lessening conflicts, as 
his talisman and shield until the day dawns 
when he knows what Dante meant when he 
wrote in the "Purgatorio," — 

"And thou shalt see those who contented are within the fire, 
Because they hope to come, whene'er it may be, to the 
blessed people." 

Second: The next great liberation and expan- 
sion of personal power comes with the function 
of the lover. The great romance, which is the 
natural and precious heritage of youth, awakens 
and develops personal capacity as does no other 
experience in life. On some not too-distant day, 
it is to be hoped thatiyou will meet that woman 
who will have for you a bright significance to 
which no other human being can ever approach. 
You will see in her the very epitome of all that 
is fairest, most honorable, most desirable, in this 
mortal world. And you will hunger for her with 
all your heart, and the joy of that hunger will 
not have one taint of misgiving or of self-re- 
proach. It will not be your badge of shame 
but your crown of honor. 1 And, if you are really 
grown up and a man, when that day comes, you 

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will take to yourself that newly discovered life, 
and say, "I know you, and have known you 
ever since first I was; and I have searched for 
you all these years, and now I have found you, 
and life is complete and you are mine. You 
are my woman, and I your man, and I am going 
to give myself to you forever and forever. I 
relinquish, O my woman, my body and my mind 
and my spirit, unto you." And she will be the 
clear candle, shining for you in the dark country 
of the world. When you look into her eyes, you 
will see mirrored there, not what you are, but 
that transfigured being which she thinks you are. 
If you say to her, "I am not this which your soul 
sees," she will answer, "You are this very thing. 
My love sees deeper than your self -distrust." 
And so the inspiration of that companionship, 
the reinforcement of that faith, will develop in 
you insights and capacities, a versatility of worth 
and a nobility of spirit of which, without her, you 
would never even have dreamed. And then, 
through long and many-colored days, and 
crowded, weary years, you will yet live, a com- 
pleted man at last, finding yourself in your mate, 
and in the children springing by your side. 

Now this is the supreme gift of the gods, 
multiplying indefinitely your personal powers and 
your abiding happiness. These, a wife's faith 

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and a child's affection, are the refreshments of 
life which neither the changes of time nor all the 
envious blows of fate can take away. But all 
this, which means the very liberation of the soul, 
is not given by life to third-rate men. If your 
lives have lost their capacity for romance, what 
then? Suppose you no longer have the power to 
idealize our human world ! If you have lost that 
mingled reserve and frankness, modesty and 
courage, which belongs to unspoiled youth, you 
cannot make this generous surrender, nor know 
the glorious madness of a supreme passion. If 
you have thrust profane and unscrupulous hands 
into all the mysteries of life, so that everything 
is known, and your eyes, too old, look unabashed 
into every corner of the world, and nothing is left 
in holiness and reserve, you cannot thus believe. 
There are men who, in these days of dawning life, 
are willing to make any horrid experiment for 
the sake of a new sensation. But life's revenge 
on them is terrible and sure. For when their 
supreme hour comes, and they meet at last her 
who might have been the rose of all their world, 
they are either unable or unwilling, or unafraid, 
to love. That, I should suppose, is the final 
depth of masculine humiliation. And, with that 
inward moral defeat, breaks the mainspring of 
their power. 

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Surely, then, in talking of the moral problem 
to the able and valuable youth of any college, 
that which it is truest and most decent to say to 
them is this: "Of course, to you, the light and 
peace of moral victory is indispensable. Of 
course, you will fight for that, even though it be 
with a broken sword, and with your back against 
the wall — fight until you win or die! For you 
look forward, being able men and true, to that 
day when, through your marriage, you shall, with 
inexpressible joy, enter into the meaning of love. 
You foresee the morning when, holding your own 
son within your arms, you shall have finally 
arrived at your majority. When his frail and 
tender baby hands reach out to yours, and his 
helpless life, unknowing and unconscious, is laid 
in the hollow of your hand, for you to make or 
mar, then you will be recompensed for all the 
discipline of the body and the travail of the 
spirit." We are too apt to associate supreme 
worth and sacredness only with the convention- 
ally religious things of life. Therein we make a 
great mistake. The most sacred places of our 
world are not the monasteries, nor the cathe- 
drals, nor the ancient shrines, nor even heroes' 
graves, nor the soil that is all compounded of the 
blood and dust of martyrs. The sacred places 
of the world, as a great New England minister 

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THE FIGHT FOR CHARACTER 

has recently said, are those where children are 
born to an honorable lover and his true beloved. 
It is toward such holy places that you now should 
worship day by day and night by night. 

Third: Another source of vital influence and 
personal power is found in the happy carrying on, 
into the burdens and conflicts of middle age, of 
the freshness and simplicity of youth. The best 
men are only boys grown up. The great ser- 
vants and teachers of the race, said Phillips 
Brooks, have been its simplifiers. They have 
lived for a few, indispensable, natural human 
things; they have brought men back to fun- 
damental values and to first principles. It is 
always true that the men, who are found suffi- 
cient when difficult and critical tasks are to be 
done, are those sublimely simple souls who have 
retained the heavenly capacity to see life in the 
large, to grasp its out-standing values, and to 
ignore the thousand modifying and confusing con- 
siderations which paralyze their lesser brethren. 
There are, Brooks continues, "men whose first 
healthy instincts have been developed and en- 
riched by wide human contacts without altering 
their character in the process." They are still 
natural, uncomplicated, ingenuous, and this 
makes them potent among their fellow men. 
For that which wins the allegiance of our brothers 

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quickest, is not intellectual superiority and per- 
sonal sophistication. They dislike the one, and 
they distrust the other. It is rather a frank and 
ready idealism which attracts them, a sincere 
and candid sentiment, the absence in us of self- 
consciousness, or of finical considerations. Great- 
ness often means just the preservation of these 
primary qualities. There is a kind of fine provin- 
cialism which high and simple men retain. A man 
may be catholic in his sympathies, accomplished 
in activities, cultivated in his appreciations, adept 
in all the better ways of human intercourse, and 
yet be easily moved to admiration, to laughter 
and to tears, and find, in the voice of a child, 
the smile of a woman, the sound of the sea upon 
the beach, the wistful cadence of a song, that 
which still sets all his blood on fire in his veins 
and girds his will for a thousand times ten 
thousand strifes. A man may be every inch a 
citizen of the world, at ease wherever men may be, 
and yet have so retained his natural sentiment 
that he cannot forget that distant place where 
his forbears are buried, nor forego the hope that, 
when the tumult and the shouting die, and the 
last ounce of energy is expended, and the last 
thought hammered out, he may lie, at the end, 
among his own, his dust mingling with that of 
those from whom he came, with whom he is at 

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home. Such simplicity and charm of spirit, such 
continued sensitiveness to elemental instinct, 
means carrying the naturalness of the child and 
the spontaneity of the youth on into the strenu- 
ous and complicated career of middle age. And 
it is more precious than words can tell. Great 
men, every year they grow older, find that life 
moves them more profoundly. Hence they are 
able to move it. 

But, here again, the basis of such simplicity 
and spontaneity of temperament is largely moral. 
Nothing so surely destroys it as premature or 
unlawful grasping at the supreme experiences of 
life. Because it is born of an inextinguishable 
faith in the essential goodness and beauty of the 
world, and this faith in the world is born of faith 
in one's self. Those who delight in life are those 
who have not exploited life. The boy who is 
most sincerely to be pitied, in any college, is he 
whose eyes are already opened to the evil in his 
associates, who already sees the canker in the 
rose of the world. When you begin to see life 
in the light of common day, then the common 
fates are yours. The tragedy of immoral living, 
from this point of view, may be summed up in a 
word. You have exchanged your youth for your 
pleasures; you have lost your naturalness in your 
sin; indulgence has killed your spontaneity; and, 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

in dissipating the rosy vision of the world, one 
instrument of power has slipped from your hands. 
Finally, there is a fourth source of personal 
power, the rarest, widest, and deepest of them all, 
which is likewise inexorably bound up with the 
personal issues of the moral life. This is the 
power of a capacious humanity. There are two 
ways in which we use the qualifying adjective 
"human" in reference to other people. The 
first way is common enough. We often say of 
a man that he is a very human sort of person, to 
indicate his gift of meeting easily and pleasantly 
all sorts and kinds of men and women. We have 
all seen public persons, or politicians, who were 
people's men, easily accessible, shrewd in their 
judgments of human nature, affable and good- 
natured, adroit in adapting themselves to every 
possible situation. Out of an easy democracy 
they appeared to be the genial and ready com- 
rades of all sorts of folk, and quickly established 
points of contact with very diverse groups of 
people. This is a common and not a particularly 
significant endowment. It has no necessary 
connection with personal character. There are 
men of all sorts and kinds of character, or the 
lack of it, who possess it. Indeed, the experience 
of the world has not been altogether happy with 
this type of person, and men tend to associate 

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THE FIGHT FOR CHARACTER 

with this power accompanying traits of shrewd 
expediencies, intense personal interests, and baser 
adaptabilities. The world has grown to distrust 
men who, chameleon-like, take their hues from 
the environment of the moment, and very rarely 
does one feel in such men the quality of great- 
ness. It seems worth while to say all this, 
because the "popular man" is so deified by 
youth, and yet, not infrequently, he is a rather 
dubious person. 

But there is another, far higher and rarer 
sense, in which a man may be said to be a great 
human being. There is a quality of public- 
mindedness, quite inseparable from moral ideal- 
ism, which, if a man has it, at once lifts him into 
leadership. One American, Abraham Lincoln, 
was supremely possessed of it. You remember 
the phrases that Emerson uses regarding him: 
"Lincoln is the true history of the American 
peoples in his time. Step by step he walked 
before them; slow with their slowness, quicken- 
ing his march by theirs; the true representative 
of this continent, an entirely public man, the 
pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, 
the thoughts of their minds articulate on his 
tongue." 

This, then, is what I mean by the power of a 
capacious humanity. Such men are in intimate 

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and potent touch with the world, not because of 
any facile adroitness or cultivated amiability, 
but because of the amount of human nature to be 
found within them. They incarnate, so to speak, 
their time. Their lives are ample and sincere and 
inclusive. They are of a sublime generosity, an 
amazing faith; they have great depth of insight 
and inexhaustible and patient sympathy. Nar- 
rowness or hardness or selfish pride of life are 
beyond their comprehension. The artificial and 
the conventional are unknown. They live in the 
abiding realities of our human nature, that nature 
of which Goethe said that, while mankind was 
always progressing, man himself remains ever 
the same. Thus they are able to interpret, in 
the terms of their own experience, all the lives 
which they touch. Do you think there is any 
higher power than this, to be able to cover, in 
thought and feeling, the human world before 
you! To be worthy to stand for the common 
human nature of your day! Is not such com- 
plete understanding and interpretation of human 
lives the ultimate end of education? Is there 
any limit to the gracious usefulness and power 
which such an endowment gives to the in- 
dividual? But, once more, we are to remember 
that such power is primarily moral. It springs 
out of an all-sufficient, inexhaustible idealism. 

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THE FIGHT FOR CHARACTER 

It is maintained by the faith and the purity of 
the individual. It cannot be separated from a 
native nobility of soul; its very elements are 
service and sacrifice and unselfish love. 

Now, there are such men who may truly be 
called the friends of their race. Wherever in the 
various departments of human effort they are 
found, they are as great rocks in a weary land. 
To them their fellow men turn to renew their 
faith and vision, to find their power and their 
peace. What would it not mean to you, O 
youth, beginning college days, with all the free- 
dom of your youth upon you, if you, in the years 
to come, could enter into the life of your genera- 
tion with such profound and noble understanding 
of it, and bless it with your power! Is there any 
mark of greatness more veritable than this, 
ability to identify yourself with your generation, 
to interpret and inspire and empower it? And is 
it not worth while, remembering how all these 
avenues of powers are closed to him who betrays 
himself, for you now to begin to say, "I will 
stand in awe, and sin not. I will commune with 
my own heart on my bed, and be still?" For 
surely I do not need to tell you that such visions 
of humanity, such conservation of the powers 
and the insights, the freshness and the faith of 
youth, are only the portion of the undefined. 

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CHAPTER IV 

THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT AND THE CHRISTIAN 
EXPERIENCE 

When the youth approaches the religious problem 
of his time and race, he enters the most fascinat- 
ing area of all human experience, the area where 
men's noblest instincts gain their expression, and 
where their motives take their rise. In no other 
department of human thought and effort are men 
so poignant in their convictions, so bitter in oppo- 
sitions, so nobly tenacious of position. Nowhere 
else does feeling run so high, or is the mind more 
abused or exalted, or the will so completely 
exercised. This is because the religious in- 
stinct is so universal and so precious to the 
human race. Men guard their religious habits 
and ideas as they guard few other things, because 
the experience of countless generations has taught 
them how indispensable they are to power and to 
peace. There is a real sense in which men may 
be said to be incurably religious; and religion, 
as distinguished from various religions, is the 
common experience of us all. 

Now, nowhere is this experience more keenly 
felt than in youth. Indeed, the great religious 

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RELIGIOUS INSTINCT 

leaders of the race have been, for the most part, 
young men; and the greatest of them died a 
youth of thirty-three. It is a silly prejudice, 
therefore, which conceives of the college student 
as irreligious, and such a conception is the re- 
verse of the truth. Nearly all youth are in- 
stinctively and profoundly religious. Of all 
people in the world, they most feel the inward 
urge to discuss the fundamental questions and to 
attack the insoluble problems. No one ponders 
more sincerely than they over the origin and the 
destiny of our race. Ancient, organized expres- 
sions of religion do not always interest them. 
The ruling passion of youth is for freedom, sim- 
plicity, and sincerity. Therefore, wherever con- 
ventionalized religious forms appear to curtail 
freedom, or to be substituting expedient policies, 
disingenuous or elaborate systems, for a sincere 
and simple faith, there youth is quickly in revolt. 
But the capacity for religious experience — more 
than that, what we may call the spiritual sense — 
is very rarely absent from normal young men and 
women. Often it most clearly shows itself 
in these very protests against expedient and 
outworn religious symbols. When a man, 
therefore, is talking on religion, there is no one 
from whom he could be more sure of a sym- 
pathetic and interested hearing and a large 

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measure of common understanding than the 
undergraduate. 

As we approach, then, this problem of peren- 
nial and universal interest, I should like to try 
to do three things; first, to state what this 
universal religious instinct is; secondly, to give 
the Christian expression and explanation of that 
instinct; and, thirdly, to point out what, in the 
light of the teaching of Jesus, is meant by the 
Christian doctrine of salvation. We begin, then, 
with the instinct itself, which, together with the 
desire for food and clothing, and the sex hunger, 
is one of the three fundamental, motor impulses 
of the race. Henry Scougall gave a popular 
definition of religion many years ago, when he 
called it "The life of God in the soul of man." 
Max Muller has a better definition, when he 
says, in "Natural Religion," that "Religion is 
the perception of the Infinite, under such mani- 
festations as are able to influence the moral 
character of man." Now, what does this mean? 
Two things chiefly. It means, first, that our 
race has a dim but stubborn sense of the delusive 
and inadequate nature of temporal things and 
mortal experience. There is an ineradicable 
conviction, found among all nations and kindreds 
and tongues, that the world, which seems to lie 
before our mortal vision so real and bright and 

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true, does actually gain both its substance and 
its significance from immaterial and unseen 
powers. The solid walls, the lofty roof, all which 
the hands can touch, the eyes can see, and the 
tongue can taste — this is but the insubstantial 
pageant of a dream. It is the ever-changing and 
obscuring expression of a changeless reality which 
pervades it all, but which is not to be identified 
with it, for it was before it, and will be after it. 
To use the language of Oriental philosophy, our 
visible world is a vast and varied veil; it is a 
cloud, an entangling mesh, behind which, keeping 
watch within the shadow, stands the higher 
Something-not-Ourselves which makes for right- 
eousness, the Providence or Nemesis of the world, 
the gods, whom, as Lucretius said, "All men 
fear, but all men yearn after." In every age 
great souls have voiced this awareness of some- 
thing above, beyond, and without, from which 
they themselves, and all which they saw and 
knew, derived their significance. This experi- 
ence, in the terminology of religion, would be 
called the belief in a god or gods. Men have 
sung their song or proclaimed their message or 
compassed their achievement with the clear per- 
ception of its incompleteness. They have known 
that they were moving about in worlds not 
realized. They have chafed at the limitations 

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of time and space and mortal sense. They have 
been conscious of being haunted by an elusive 
and flying goal, which disturbed them with a 
glimpse of more permanent and final things. It 
is this perception of the inner and unchanging 
reality, which is quite independent of time and 
space, which has been the hope and inspiration 
of our race. In every generation, men have 
found strength for the battle and peace for the 
pain by seeing our inscrutable human life as an 
interlude in that fuller, freer reality which was 
before it, which shall be after it, which to-day 
lies roundabout it. They have found the key 
to Nature, the interpretation of man's physical 
environment through regarding it as the expres- 
sion of a supreme intelligence beyond it all. 
Nearly three thousand years ago there lived a 
poet who wrote, "The heavens declare the glory 
of God, and the firmament showeth his handi- 
work." Another who said: — 

"Whither shall I go from thy presence, 

Or whither shall I fly from thy spirit? 

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there. 

If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. 

If I take the wings of the morning, 
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 
Even there shall thy hand hold me 
And thy right hand shall lead me." 
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In 1798, in England, Wordsworth published in 
the "Lyrical Ballads," perhaps the most signif- 
icant piece of verse of the eighteenth century, 
in which this same instinct finds another of its 
myriad expressions. You remember the lines 
in "Tintern Abbey": — 

"For I have learned to look on nature 

Not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, 

But hearing oftentimes the still, sad music 

Of humanity, nor harsh, nor grating, 

But of ample power to chasten and subdue. 

And I have felt a Presence which disturbs me 

With the joy of elevated thoughts. 

A sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused 

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns 

And the round ocean and the living air 

And the blue sky and in the mind of man. 

A motion and a spirit that impels all thought, 

All objects of all thought, 

And rolls through all things." 

It is this perception of the Divine which has 
created our philosophy and maintained our meta- 
physic. It is this which lies deepest in human 
hearts. It makes the warfare bearable and the 
days tolerable. It makes men eager to live, yet 
nobly curious to die. The foundation of all 
human hopes and dignity, the source of racial 
reverence and faith, is this perception, that One 
like unto a God, untouched, lofty and serene, 
walketh with us amid the fiery furnace of our life. 

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The second element of this religious instinct is 
the sense of perplexity and bafflement and un- 
easiness which accompanies this perception. 
Men know a God, but they seem to be removed 
from Him. They feel the Eternal, yet they tend 
to fear and hide themselves in the presence of 
the Eternal. Indeed, man's ever-failing but 
never-ending struggle against baffling odds, to 
grasp and understand and live with the Divine, 
is the most noble and tragic expression of our 
race. For between the two, the Eternal Spirit, 
unseen but felt, and the hesitant and uncertain 
spirit of a man, there would seem to be a great 
gulf fixed. Desire, insatiable, unwavering, looks 
out from the eyes of each generation of our race. 
It is this incredible intensity and persistency of 
striving and longing which is both the tragedy 
and the glory of our common lot. The main- 
spring of human activity, the creative impulse, 
from which, in devious ways, all the thousand- 
hued motives of our lives proceed, is revealed 
in the ancient cry, "My soul thirsteth for God, 
for the living God." That unquenched thirst 
for Him underlies all human life as the solemn 
stillness of the ocean underlies the fretful waves. 
This is what William James called the uneasiness 
of the race, the sense of something being wrong 
about us as we naturally stand. It is this which 

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has built the altars, prescribed the penances, and 
made the pilgrimages. Out of this have grown 
the rites and ceremonies, the scourgings and 
renunciations of the various ancient faiths. 
From this unquenched thirst, this profound un- 
easiness, the immeasurable volume of human 
prayer has issued, bearing up to heaven, through 
uncounted generations of the race, the vision and 
the anguish, the love and the tears, of our 
common humanity. The pathetic readiness, the 
guileless eagerness of mankind, to give its faith 
to any occult and mystic thing, from table- 
tipping and palm-reading up through the long, 
sordid, tawdry list to the present popular methods 
of praying to one's own thought and hypnotizing 
one's own self — these all bear witness to man's 
persistent but uneasy endeavor to grasp and be 
reconciled with this elusive spirit. " The dynamic 
of the world is the sense of the divine reality." 
The woe of the world is man's inability to dis- 
cover and appropriate that reality. All human 
sorrow originates in the sense of being apart from 
God or the things or the children of God. You, 
when you shall have entered truly into life, will 
perceive, beneath all the glitter of its brilliance 
and its genius, underneath the roar of its energy 
and achievement, the note of melancholy. The 
great undertone of life is solemn in its uniformity 

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of pathos. The poets and prophets of every 
age have seized unerringly upon that melancholy 
undertone. Sophocles, long ago, heard it by the 
iEgean, and it inspired his somber dramas of the 
turbid ebb and flow of human misery. Some- 
times the voices of our humanity, as they rise, 
blend and compose into one great cry that is 
lifted shivering and tingling to the stars: "O 
that I knew where I might find Him!" Some- 
times, and more often, they sink into a half 
unconscious, subdued, and minor plaint, in- 
finitely touching in its human solicitude, per- 
plexity, and pain. You know how Arnold 
phrases that undertone in "Dover Beach": 

"Ah, love, let us be true 

To one another ! For the world which seems 

To lie before us like a land of dreams, 

So various, so beautiful, so new, 

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, 

And we are here as on a darkling plain 

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 

Where ignorant armies clash by night." 

This, then, is the experience which you have 
inherited as children of the human race. In 
brief and conventional language, we call it the 
sense of God and the sense of sin. This is what 
we mean when we say that men are naturally 
religious. We mean that each generation has, 

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as a matter of fact, found itself born into a 
struggling, baffled, troubled world, a world aware 
of the Divine beyond the obvious, but also of 
some self -erected barrier which kept it from the 
Divine; a world caught in the snare of the seen 
and the temporal, but reaching out to the Unseen 
and the Eternal. The theologies and the philos- 
ophies, the faiths and superstitions, the sublime 
religious affirmations, the passionate religious 
negations, are all the products of this fact of 
human experience. Without it, the word "be- 
liever" and the word "skeptic" would neither 
of them have any significance, nor would they 
ever have come into existence. Both represent 
diverse interpretations of, contrasted attitudes 
toward, the common instinct of us all. 

This, then, is religion. What, then, is Chris- 
tianity? The Christian's religion is that accept- 
ance and explanation of the human instinct 
which rests back upon the Person and the 
teaching of Jesus. Christianity takes this uni- 
versal belief and makes two specific affirma- 
tions regarding it; sublime, or, if you please, 
audacious, affirmations. It asserts, first, that 
there is an objective Reality, which answers to 
this universal subjective instinct. There is a 
God, one true and changeless Spirit, out of whose 
depths issued your spirit and mine. That which 



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haunts the soul and will not let it be is not a 
delusion, a self -suggested, self -projected Being, 
issuing from our fancied need. It is the most 
solemn and potent of all realities. This is the 
basic and comprehensive message of the Chris- 
tian faith. This will be your stay, when in the 
years to come you begin to struggle against time. 
That which invests the Church with her inde- 
fectible dignity and significance is that she stands 
as- the witness that in the beginning and in 
the present and in the ending, from everlasting 
to everlasting, is God. He surrounds and inter- 
penetrates and includes the life of every man and 
every thing. In Him all beauty, goodness, and 
truth exist forever and forever. In Him all 
beings, races, worlds, and universes live and 
move. Whatever we do He hath graciously 
made possible. Every successful endeavor is the 
permitted expression of his energy. Every true 
thought is a spark struck from the anvil of the 
Supreme Mind. Every pure hope and high 
desire is the breath of his holy spirit. Every 
deed and tendency of our daily life is real or 
unreal, significant or impotent, as it is in har- 
mony or out of harmony with Him. Beneath 
and around all our ignorance of God is his 
intimate and inclusive perception of ourselves. 
Christianity begins with this proclamation: "O 

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men who dream of the stars and of your kinship 
with a timeless and imperial world, is it not a 
solemn and sobering thing to know that your 
dream is true!" 

But Christianity does more than this. After 
affirming the reality of God, it has its own 
distinctive method of realizing that reality. 
Here we come to what is probably most salient 
and precious in the teaching of Jesus. Men have 
often thought of God in terms of a crude, physical 
anthropomorphism, as a sort of Oriental poten- 
tate, a projected political and material power. 
They often have conceived of Him in terms of 
abstract speculation, trying to make Him every- 
thing which man is not. But Jesus' vision of 
God is not in the terms of a crude, physical 
anthropomorphism, nor in the terms of the abso- 
lute, or of abstract a priori speculation. It is 
He who teaches us to endeavor to approach and 
know the Infinite by means of the ethical and 
spiritual experience of our race. It is not merely 
monotheism, therefore, but ethical and spiritual 
monotheism, which is characteristic of the Judaic- 
Christian faith. Jesus teaches that God is justly 
conceived of when we think of Him as the 
Eternal Father, Lord of heaven and earth, known 
to us in terms of redeeming and sacrificial love. 
This love is both supremely exemplified and 

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bestowed in Him. He is the God who loveth all 
his children with an equal and impartial affec- 
tion, making his sun to shine on the evil and on 
the good, and sending rain on the just and on 
the unjust. He does not dwell afar in some 
flaming sun of his mighty universe, a remote and 
stationary being, occasionally breaking into this 
world to manifest Himself in prodigious and 
inexplicable ways. But He is a present spirit, 
encompassing and infusing each particle of his 
creation. The Father of all, his love goeth out 
to embrace them all. Every man born into the 
world He follows with love from the beginning 
until the very end. No man need ever be weak, 
for the Father desires to perfect his weakness 
in his strength. No man need ever be con- 
sumed with restlessness and discontent, for the 
Father waiteth to endow him with the abundance 
of his peace. No man need ever be lost, because 
the Shepherd is always seeking his wandering 
sheep. No man need ever be discouraged by 
reason of the sins of his youth, for this is the 
Father who sees the prodigal coming a long way 
off, and runs and falls on his neck and kisses him. 
What, then, is the Christian content of this 
universal, divine perception? What is Jesus' 
idea of God? It is infinite spirit, manifested in 
the terms of redemptive love, a love so freely and 

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supremely given that, in the words of Jesus to 
the Samaritan woman, we know that God seek- 
eth his true worshipers. It is redemptive love 
supremely exemplified in service, so that, in the 
touching example of Jesus, he who knoweth that 
he comes from God and goes to God will, in his 
supreme moment of God-likeness, gird himself 
with a towel and wash his disciples' feet. It is 
a redemptive love, which not only yearns over 
men, and delights to serve them, but will carry 
service to the uttermost point of sacrifice, so 
that they who are filled with this God's spirit, 
and are like Him, might, with Paul, wish them- 
selves accursed of God for their brethren's sake, 
or might, with Jesus, hang forsaken of God upon 
a cross, for the sons of man. 

How marvelous, then, original, audacious, and 
incredible is Jesus' interpretation of the common 
instinct of our race! The Spirit which haunts 
the world and will not let it be is not an angry, 
nor an imperial, nor an exacting master, but a 
beneficent Redeemer, revealing Himself to us in 
a single-minded, educative, reformative, con- 
structive love. This God, whom the world has 
both feared and yearned after, is not a gloomy 
and transcendent monarch, dark with vengeance, 
resistless in purpose, unflinching in justice, 
grinding out the lives of evil men beneath the 

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chariot wheels of his inexorable law. He is not 
an arbitrary pagan God, a whimsical spirit, 
sporting impishly with his helpless and amusing 
creatures, feeling no obligations toward us, his 
manifold and minute creations, who crawl ant- 
like over our little speck of earth. Nor is He a 
sort of glorified St. Nicholas, sitting up there in 
the heavens, a vast and unethical Benevolence, 
smiling vacantly as He tosses out his indiscrimi- 
nate gifts, his affection a lazy and indulgent fond- 
ness for men, like that which the cat shows for 
her litter of kittens. Men have often thought all 
these things regarding Infinity! But no! God 
is a moral Being, caring infinitely for us, and con- 
fessing his obligations towards us, because He has 
made us moral beings too. Our importance in 
the eyes of the Infinite rests in the fact that there 
is no relationship capable of being measured or 
appraised between material bulk and moral 
worth. Infinitesimal as we are, evanescent and 
futile as is the shadow of our day, we are yet 
precious to the Eternal, because his breath is 
within us, and we, like gods, can distinguish 
between good and evil. The interest of the 
Eternal Majesty, then, in us, is not an unethical 
love, which winks at sin, and cares not greatly 
if we break its laws, and trusts in man's automa- 
tic, ultimate arrival at righteousness. It is a 

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severe and holy affection, which has nothing 
whatever to do with sentimental or complacent 
or indulgent passion, a love whose content is 
service, whose method is sacrifice, whose goal is 
racial redemption, which is given to us not be- 
cause of what we are, but because of what, 
through it, God has willed we should become. 
It is a love, then, so pure and holy that it will 
send every discipline and bend every will to bring 
men to desire that end to which they were 
divinely destined; a love which will send us into 
hell, a thousand hells, indeed, if that is what we 
need to make us willing to let the best in us 
express and come to itself. Only such is the 
mystery of the divinity of this sovereign and 
redemptive love that it elects to share every 
detail of the experience of its children, and will 
go into hell with us, suffering there a greater 
agony than our own, like the Jesus who for us 
men and our salvation knelt in unutterable and 
inexplicable anguish beneath the gray-leaved 
olives of Gethsemane. This, then, is the first 
thing in the Christian teaching. There is a God, 
man's instinct has played him true; and that 
God is known to the race, oh, incredible assertion, 
in the terms of holy, ministering, sacrificial love. 
The second thing in the Christian teaching 
is this: Man who is uneasy in God's presence 

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may become reconciled to Him. He may find 
God and himself in God. It was the very intent 
and mission of Jesus, his conscious purpose in the 
world, to show us, that, from the very beginning, 
this is what God has desired, that always the 
Eternal Life has been flowing out toward us, 
and that we have nothing to do but to believe in 
it, accept it, and by its power live ourselves in 
the high realms of service, joyous sacrifice, and 
the loving spirit. 

But how can we believe in such a God? How 
is it possible to have such a stupendous faith? 
Because of Jesus. The most wonderful thing in 
the finite world that we know is that He lived 
this God life. The things He said God was, He 
was. The life was, so to speak, incarnate in 
Him. This gracious and Eternal Spirit, ob- 
scurely seen and reached after in all the universe, 
came into our world, in an especial and ideal way, 
in Him. It may be said, without irreverence, 
that God, in so far as a human mind can grasp 
or need Him, became in Jesus an empirical fact. 
Jesus is, therefore, the world's hostage for its 
sublime belief. He came, an event in time and 
space, and was, this loving, serving, and sacri- 
ficial life. So we know such a life is real and 
possible, and possible even in this unjust and 
sorrowful world. For we have seen it here. 

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Jesus proves it. Indeed, He said, and if He had 
not said, men from their own experience would 
have known, that He came into the world that 
we might know that God is, and that He is the 
Redeemer of his children. This is why men have 
turned to Jesus as the One altogether lovely, as 
the One through whom, and by whom, they have 
been saved, to their eternal selves and their 
Eternal Father. It is, then, through Jesus, be- 
cause of what He was and did, that we are able 
to believe. The noblest, happiest thing a human 
being ever does, the act which comprehends the 
very essence of faith and good will, is when he 
says: "I will believe in and return to God, for 
Jesus' sake, and choose for myself the spiritual 
life." For then a new power flows into his being, 
and then he begins to know the heavenly Father 
for himself. Then belief in God is no longer 
accepting Him entirely on faith; for then we 
have begun the verification by experience, and 
we know of ourselves and within ourselves that 
we are dealing with realities. 

And this new proof from within substantiates 
itself by enabling us to live, to some extent, the 
God life of which Jesus spoke, and which He was. 
For, moved by this new spirit within us, we 
begin to be able to love our fellow men in the 
same way that God loves us, and to find our lives 

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in the sacrificial service of our race. It is 
Christians who prove the Christian experience, 
and, in every generation, there have been some 
Christians in the world. If we had only a Paul, 
an Augustine, a St. Francis, a Luther, a Wesley, 
or a Brooks, we should have enough to know that 
what Jesus said, and was, is true. 

We begin to understand, then, do we not? 
what it means to be a Christian. It means to 
take the same attitude toward the world that 
Jesus took, and to love our fellow men with the 
same sort of love wherewith God loves us. Then 
we must serve men according to their need, not 
according to their desert, even as God has done 
more for the worst of us than the best of us could 
possibly deserve, and has thought more of the 
sheep on the mountains than of those secure 
within the fold. So we long to bless them that 
curse us; for how an evil, cursing heart needs 
blessing! Transformed, so to speak, by this 
vision of the eternal grace, the magnanimity of 
Divinity, we, too, pour out, for and around men, 
an unexpected, undeserved affection; we eagerly 
and gladly give them what no law could demand 
and no force could compel. We are patient with 
our brothers, we believe in them, we put our- 
selves in their places; we forget our comforts and 
our desires, in their wants and needs. We give 

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more to the worst of them than they would ever 
have dreamed of expecting from us, because we 
have found that our God is more willing to hear 
than we to pray, and ever giveth to us exceedingly 
abundantly, above all we could ask or think. 
We know, through practice, what was the 
principle of conduct in Jesus' mind, when He 
cried, in his vivid Oriental hyperbole of speech, 
"If a man ask my coat, with joy I give him my 
cloak also; if he smite me on one cheek, I turn 
to him the other, and if he want me to walk a 
mile with him, I go with him twain." For this 
is but a picturesque illustration of the Christian 
principle by which men have ever known the 
disciples of Jesus; the principle of the out- 
reaching, forth-giving life, the life which is only 
limited in its service and its comradeship by the 
perception of its neighbor's need or the extent 
of its neighbor's capacity to receive. 

The Christian experience, then, is not summed 
up in conformity to pious practice, nor in the 
mere attainment of personal character. Indeed, 
the distinctively Christian experience can scarcely 
be said to have begun with the mere attainment 
of character. For discipleship of Jesus means 
character for service and salvation for the com- 
munity. No one can be united with God unless, 
in principle and desire, one becomes like Him. 

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But to be like Him one must be the lover and 
servant of the race, just as He is the Lover and 
Saviour of the race. Union with God, then, is 
accomplished by oneness with humanity. If I 
love not my brother whom I have seen, how 
can I love God whom I have not seen? Hence, 
to be a follower of Jesus, means to be a lover of 
men. It means vicarious suffering, spontaneous, 
irresistible outgoing for less fortunate men. It 
means a poignant sensitiveness to human need, 
an unquenchable protest against human injustice, 
an unutterable yearning to supply deficiencies 
for the handicapped, and tenderest healing for 
the wounded. It means that you and I, re- 
stored and empowered with the divine love and 
light, ache with desire, burn with intensity to 
redeem with it our fellow men. Mazzini, states- 
man of the new Italy, had caught the Christian 
spirit when he said, "When I see any one called 
good, I ask, 'Who, then, has he saved?" 

"But," you will say, "is this Christianity? 
I thought to be a Christian meant accepting a 
certain plan of salvation; I thought it meant 
believing in the Virgin birth; I thought it meant 
subscription to the metaphysical doctrine of the 
deity of Christ. I supposed a Christian was one 
who held a certain view of the inspiration of 
Scripture. I thought Christian discipleship car- 

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ried with it the acceptance of one world-view. 
I did n't see how you could be a Christian, for 
instance, and believe in evolution. Besides, I 
supposed that for Christians there were certain 
things you could do, and certain other things 
you could n't do. Surely, Christianity means 
going to church and praying and reading your 
Bible and not being worldly. Why, I have even 
been taught that if you were a Christian, you 
might not dance or play cards or go to the 
theater. Is n't the Christian a sort of holier- 
than-thou person, who has to repress most of 
his natural instincts and go through the world 
a deadly respectable, hopelessly good person? 
The thing of which you have been speaking here 
is incredibly difficult, indeed, and almost un- 
believable, but such a life would be so radiant 
and joyous, so high and true — there is some- 
thing very deep in me that answers to it!" 

No, the Christian experience is n't any of 
these things that so many earnest and reflective 
youth have imagined it to be. Many of these 
things are effects of it, but none of them must be 
identified with it. I have been at some pains in 
this chapter, in trying not to give you, so far as I 
could help it, any one of the many philosophies 
of Christianity. Of course, no one can talk about 
religion at all without implying some definite 

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view of men and the world which lies behind it. 
But I have avoided the theological terminology, 
and those many and contrasting intellectual 
statements of the faith by which each age has 
fitted it into its own view of the world. And I 
have also tried to speak of Christianity in the 
terms of the principles of action, rather than in 
those of specific conduct. For here, again, con- 
duct will change from generation to generation, 
and the sort of life which expresses Christianity 
in one age is quite unlike the sort of life which 
will express it in another. I have been trying 
to give you the thing which lies beneath the 
theologies, which creates the philosophies, which 
finds its expression in conduct, namely, the 
experience of God in Christ. It is out of this 
mighty experience and the power of it that a new 
type of life issues, and that new type is Chris- 
tianity. For the first thing we ought to under- 
stand about our faith is this: it is n't a form 
of ideas, and it is n't a form of words, and it is 
n't a rite. It 's a power, a mighty, spiritual 
force, sweeping down through the centuries in 
much the same way that the Gulf Stream sweeps 
through the Atlantic Ocean, carrying warmth 
and life and healing wherever it goes. That 
power is born of the incontestable fact of experi- 
ence, that, in Jesus, men have it certified to them 

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that there is a God, even as their minds have 
foreseen and their hearts have desired; and that 
this God is such an One as was Jesus Himself. 

Let me sum up briefly what we have been 
saying. The Christian faith issues out of the 
common background of our race, the sense of a 
holy God and a sinful world placed over against 
each other, as if they were separated. The sinful 
world, down through countless generations, has 
been afraid. It has thought that God was apart 
from it, had no care for it, was angry with it. It 
has tried to placate Him and bribe Him. It has 
given its firstborn for its transgressions, the fruit 
of its body for the sin of its soul. And then came 
Jesus. And the Christian message consists in 
his announcement of the kind of a being God is, 
and what such a God means to this kind of a 
world. God loves the world, and bears it on his 
heart. Our sin has not extinguished or dimmed 
the divine affection, but determined the form 
which that affection takes. The holy Being, 
who loves a sinful world, must desire to deliver 
it from its sin, since in no other way can He bless 
it, or have it for his own. Therefore, the passion 
to save is the characteristic expression of the love 
of the living God for mortal men. 

We come, at last, to the third and final thing 
which we want to say. Just what is this experi- 

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ence of salvation which the Church in every age 
has taught? What is it that really happens to 
us; and does the same thing happen to all men, 
when we actually believe in the God of Jesus and 
relinquish ourself to Him? Here is a helpless, 
ignorant, sinful man. Now, what occurs in him, 
when, through Jesus, or for Jesus' sake, he re- 
turns to God? Always, in men's experience, 
three things. The first thing that he finds has 
happened to him is that he is come into a new 
relation, both to God and to his fellow men. He 
is brought out of his loneliness; he no longer has 
that sense of estrangement from God and of 
isolation from other human beings. The feeling 
of being shut up, within and to himself, vanishes. 
He is n't afraid any more; hence his powers are 
liberated, and he feels free, and can be himself 
again in the sight of men, in the open day. His 
shame is wiped away. He feels right once more 
and as if he had come to himself after a bad 
dream. For the moment he makes up his mind, 
on the strength of the testimony and the person 
of Jesus, to believe, and take the leap in the dark, 
and give up his will to this wonderful divine will, 
then he has the unspeakably precious gift of 
divine forgiveness. The guilt and the power of 
his previous wrongdoing have vanished. His 
surrender makes him one with God; therefore, 
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there flows into his life a great tide of joy and free- 
dom and peace. The man has come home, and 
he feels himself at home in God's world and with 
every other human being. Then, next, out of 
these new relations, and the new motives and 
powers which they create, he gets a new char- 
acter; he becomes a different kind of person. A 
great accession of moral energy is the result of 
this normal relationship with God and men. 
His personal and intimate touch with the living 
Spirit composes and heals his life, and makes it 
pure and simple and natural again. So little by 
little, old habits, ancient lusts, worldly and rest- 
less activities, are crowded out by the new life 
that is welling up within him. And, finally, 
these new relationships which issue in a new 
character, make him believe in a new destiny. 
They bring him in touch, so to speak, with an- 
other world than this, a world that does not fade, 
and does not change, the world that always is. 
For he has a very clear conviction that all that 
is happening to him now has little to do with his 
body or his mortality. It is n't a physical and 
material experience; it is moral and spiritual 
experience which is now transforming him. It 
is his self, his soul, as we say, that has been taken 
out of darkness and the prison house, and set free, 
like a joyous bird, in an infinite and untrammeled 

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world. So the man begins to believe that since 
he has found God, and a moral and spiritual life 
in God, he can no more die than God can die, 
and that, in so far as he wins to moral and 
spiritual values, he wins to things that are of 
eternal worth. This, I take it, is salvation. 

How glorious a thing, then, is religion! How 
infinitely greater it is than any of its social or 
personal manifestations ! Never again confound 
religion with mere amiable living or mechanical 
believing. Never identify it with even the most 
beneficent of its social activities. Never think 
of it as being concerned only, or chiefly, with the 
issues of this present life. Religion maintains 
itself in perennial power, because men have never 
been willing to believe that they belonged only 
to this present life, and have never been able to 
satisfy themselves with anything or everything 
which this life has to give. For always, when 
men have looked abroad upon their world, they 
have seen the inextricable mingling of good and 
evil, the mystery of its strife and pain and 
injustice. And always, when they have looked 
within, upon themselves, they have faced the 
inexpressible sorrow and loneliness of human 
life. Thereby they have been forced to concern 
themselves with the solemn questions which 
have to do with the origin and the meaning 

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and the destiny of the race. Where did we all 
come from? Did we come from anything? Y/hat 
are we here for? Where are we all going? Is 
there anything after this life which can possibly 
compensate for it? If a man die, shall he live 
again? And the Christian experience has a 
triumphant answer to these questions. Jesus 
and his followers say, "We know from whence 
we came. We came out from an Eternal Life, 
a loving and a gracious Spirit. And we know 
where we are going. We shall return to that 
from which, in the beginning, we came. In God 
we live, and move and have our being. In God 
we now exist, and we shall exist, forever and 
forever." 

This is only words to you. No one of you 
can possibly know now, what it means. But 
such a conviction represents the sublime effort, 
the supreme achievement of the human race. 
Toward that conviction may you live! 



CHAPTER V 

THE EXCEEDING DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 

We tried to describe to you, in the last chapter, 
what the Christian experience is. We saw that 
our human race is incurably religious; that 
nearly all men and women, in all times and 
places, have had a sense of the unknown, a hunger 
for God, a feeling that they were moving about 
in worlds not realized. We saw, too, that accom- 
panying this intuitive awareness of the Divine 
was the sense of bafflement and perplexity and 
uneasiness. Men wanted God, but could n't 
get at Him; and they were more or less afraid 
and felt themselves guilty in his presence. The 
sacred writings of the world, the beautiful 
mythologies of Greece and Rome, the poetry, 
the drama, even the fiction of our race — all 
these bear an abundant and impressive witness 
to the life of God struggling to find an expression 
in the soul of man, and to man desiring, yet 
fearing, this life, and apparently unable to dis- 
cover and appropriate it unaided. 

On the basis of this widespread instinct rests 
the Christian faith. It gives to that instinct a 
specific sanction and a unique content. The 

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good news of Jesus is that there is a creative 
Spirit pervading all the world, manifesting Him- 
self in everything we see and know and think and 
do; closer to us than our breathing, nearer to us 
than hands and feet; and that He is a loving 
and a gracious Spirit, having compassion for the 
children of men, assuring them that He hath 
made no barriers between their spirits and his; 
determined to serve them all to the uttermost. 
He gives his love to men according to their need, 
not according to their desert. He is more willing 
to hear than we to pray. He hath prepared for 
them that love Him such things as pass man's 
understanding. All that we have to do, in order 
to know and live with this gracious Spirit, is to 
believe in Him, open our lives to his influence, 
accept the forgiveness which He offers, and, 
loving our fellow men in the same way that God 
loves us, thus become citizens of the heavenly 
Kingdom. The reality of this loving, gracious, 
sacrificial Spirit is certified to us in Jesus. Jesus 
lived the thing He talked about. He was what 
He revealed. Men would never have dared to 
believe in a God like this if they had not seen 
Him made manifest in the flesh, in Jesus the 
Galilean. Hence men, for Jesus' sake, because 
of Jesus, trusting in Him, have said, "I believe 
it; I do believe there is a holy, potent, gracious 

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Spirit, and that my spirit belongs to Him. I do 
believe, since Jesus said so, and died to prove it, 
that the Father will forgive me all my wrong- 
doing if I will only come to Him. And so I am 
going to come." And then we saw that, when 
men do thus accept the Christian Gospel on 
faith, they are able to prove it is true in their own 
experience by the marvelous things which it does 
to them. For it gives them a new relationship, 
both to God and men. It brings them out of the 
feeling of loneliness, out of the sense of fear and 
shame. There is n't any experience any more 
of being apart from God or men. On the con- 
trary, we know we are with Him, and we listen 
for his voice; we rest in his power; we are 
subdued and composed by his secret presence. 
Also it happens to us that when we thus believe, 
we attain to a nobler and a truer disposition. 
Faith makes a new man of us. There are new 
forms of self-expression and new motives. Ap- 
parently the old channels in the brain are wiped 
out, for ancient lusts and base inclinations dis- 
appear. Generous and noble desires take their 
place, and we find ourselves living unselfish and 
honorable lives. And, finally, this also happens 
to us. The whole experience of this new nature 
is in the field of the spirit; and it gives us the 
consciousness of a new destiny. Its values are 

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moral; and they so intimately ally us with what 
we think God is that we expect to go on in this 
free, unselfish, joyous life forever. 

These are the marvelous things that happen 
in human lives, when, by this active belief in 
Jesus and the God of Jesus, men come into 
contact with that new power which we call 
Christianity. These things prove the reality 
and the validity of the Christian faith. They 
give the only proof of which it is capable, the 
verification by experience. 

Now this is, as I see it, what it means to be a 
Christian. Most of us who read these words are 
already predisposed to accept all that the term 
"Christian" implies. Our inheritance and en- 
vironment and training, all push us that way. 
Our very youth, with its mystic intuitions, which 
middle age loses and forgets, urges us to a high 
venture of faith. And yet hundreds of us go 
through college and lose our religion while we 
are there, and many and many an educated man 
wants to believe, but cannot. Can we, then, in 
these pages, get at any of the reasons why good 
men and true, naturally high-minded and spiritu- 
ally sensitive men, find it difficult to say, with 
intellectual integrity and moral candor, "I am a 
Christian"? 

I think those reasons can be grouped under 
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four heads. First of all, it is not surprising that 
many undergraduates lose their religion, for such 
faith as this makes a supreme demand upon both 
the will and the belief of the individual. It may 
justly be said to tax his credulity to the utmost. 
This assumption that there is a God, and that 
that God is love, that the underlying principle 
of the universe is sacrificial service, and that 
through this service men come into their real 
and satisfying self-expression — this is an enor- 
mous assumption. There is a great deal in 
human nature which appears to go directly con- 
trary to it, and men instinctively dislike to 
believe it. Over against Jesus' statement that 
God is love, there stands another world-wide 
assumption, one which is much more native to 
the untutored human spirit and much more 
easily verifiable — the assumption that God, if 
there be a God, is force, is brute strength; that 
might is the only right. There are men who 
simply cannot accept the ultimate reality of this 
religious hypothesis of ours. They assert that 
the natural self-expressions and the durable satis- 
factions of life are to be found, not in the terms 
of service and sacrifice and love, but in the terms 
of self-will and material power. We are here to 
learn how to dominate our present world. That 
world is as a great arena, strewn with the wrecks 



THE EXCEEDING DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 

and debris of the ages, on whose torn and bloody 
sands each generation wages its own ruthless war. 
Soon our turn will come to struggle in that arena 
for the satisfaction of our desires and for our 
personal prestige. And in that struggle it must 
be each man for himself and the devil take the 
hindmost. Neitzsche is right. Power and domi- 
nation are the goals of life. The strong man 
stands above the law, while he makes it for those 
beneath. A man, if he be a man, wherever he 
has the chance to consult his own will, takes it, 
and gratifies his will to the full. All this talk 
about service and sacrifice and stewardship, 
and about democracy and brotherhood, is the 
cant of the weakling, the sentimentalist, and the 
slave. Bismarck is our man. It 's blood and 
iron, not love, which makes a man a conqueror. 
There is very much in our world to support 
this doctrine, which is the very antithesis of 
Christianity. On this view are founded all the 
ancient empires. It governs the politics of Asia 
and of Europe to this day. This was the faith of 
imperial Rome, the creed of Napoleon, and of the 
robber barons of the Rhine. This, too, is the creed 
of most American as well as European life. In di- 
plomacy, in all sorts of commercial, international 
relationships, might is right, grab what you can; 
the strong man dominates, and social service, 

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and justice for the weaker nations, are just 
foolish fictions. The strifes which, for the last 
two years, have convulsed and devastated the 
Balkan States, offer a grim commentary upon 
the ascendancy of this principle of life, as much 
among the so-called Christian as among the Mo- 
hammedan peoples. This is the creed of our so- 
cial world. The over- wealthy and the insolently 
worldly think that there is one code of ethics for 
them and another for the common man, and that, 
having money, which is power, they may do 
about as they please. Hence their speeding 
vehicles crush the unwary, and their domestic 
scandals furnish the salacious amusement of the 
proletariat. This is the creed of much of our 
business world. Wherever men get together 
huge aggregations of capital for private enrich- 
ment, and then proceed by unsocial and unjust 
methods to heartlessly push their weaker breth- 
ren to the wall, they thereby scoff at Jesus, and 
at his religion, and bow to Mammon and the flesh. 
This is the creed of the greater part of our social 
and industrial order. The feud between capital 
and labor is an economic feud, inexpressibly 
brutal, and wholly unmoral in its recognition 
only of self and might. The ruthless corpora- 
tion exploits the bodies and souls of its employees, 
often determines their wages by their hunger, 
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and eases its own conscience and placates the 
community by the endowment, through its 
inhumanly gotten gains, of hospitals and col- 
leges and churches. The laborer, in savage fury, 
strikes back, threatens the persons and the 
property of those above him, brings the bludgeon 
of the picket down upon the head of the scab, 
organizes a world-wide anarchy, irresponsible, 
futile, dangerous. It is all infinitely far removed 
from the person and teaching of Jesus. There 
are few indications of brotherhood or adequate 
sense of social responsibility in our industrial 
world. The old economy, that might is right, 
rules in both camps. And, again, this is the 
creed of much of our political life. Men use the 
stewardship of large funds for private gain. 
They use public office for personal aggrandize- 
ment, ruthlessly exploit the vast natural re- 
sources of the nation, lay heavy burdens of debt 
upon the shoulders of the coming generation, 
and consider that their opportunity is their 
sufficient justification. 

Our world, in short, is not a Christian world. 
It would be transparent folly to so regard it, and 
most men don't believe in the Christian spirit. 
Ours is a fairly brutal, quite ruthless civilization, 
where nearly every man is out for the goods; 
where we want money, and we want power, and 

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we want fame and ease and luxury, and we don't 
much care how we get them, if only they are 
ours. Moving over the face of this materialistic 
and imperial civilization is the Spirit of Jesus, and 
on the whole He is making it kindlier and more 
decent with each succeeding generation. But 
the first great shock which comes to the young 
man who has merely accepted Christianity as a 
matter of course, and has regarded it as being 
actively and widely operative in modern society, 
is to find out what Christianity really is, how 
little of it, at any time, there has been in the 
world, and how comparatively little there is now. 
The world does n't believe in it, and Jesus was 
perfectly right when He said that you will have 
to set your face against the world if you do. 

And yet I would bid you remember that for 
all this Christian faith is so sublimely unpractical, 
so difficult and audacious, and although it has 
made so little headway in two thousand years, 
nevertheless the best things in our contemporary 
life are those which are the embodiments of it. 
The foundation of our present civilization is the 
home, and every decent home you ever saw is 
built, not upon the imperial principle of might 
and self-will, but upon the Christian principle of 
service and sacrifice and love. Christianity 
produced what the child to-day calls "father" 

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THE EXCEEDING DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 

and "mother." Christianity has made child life 
free and joyous. Again, the best things of the 
modern state are direct expressions of the 
Christian principle, and they show that principle 
to be extraordinarily potent and beneficent in 
action. The hospital, which replaces the casting- 
out of the sick and the infirm; the reformatory, 
which is replacing the prison; the old-age pen- 
sions, the child-labor laws and the minimum- 
wage laws; the determined attacks upon the 
drink traffic and the sex traffic; the economic 
and political independence which the community 
is about to grant to women, — all these are 
directly contrary to the old imperial principle. 
They are all products of Jesus' concept of God 
as incarnate love, and of the law of life as the 
law of justice and unselfish service. I grant 
you, therefore, that it is hard to believe in the 
Christian view of the world; for the world does n't 
naturally take to it, and most of the expres- 
sions of our civilization flout and deny it. Yet I 
would remind you that it is worth while to face 
this difficult Christian principle seriously, and 
courageously to try to achieve belief in it. For 
it is certainly true that wherever men have really 
given Christianity a chance and have actually 
lived it, either as individuals or as groups, it 
has transformed the face of human nature, and 

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made the wilderness to blossom as the rose, 
and brought back hope and courage, freedom 
and joy, and the voice of praise into our sorrow- 
ful human life. 

The second reason, I think, why men are apt 
to lose their faith is that there is so much in the 
make-up of human life itself, and in the nature 
of the universe, its laws and operations, as we 
see them, which appears to be directly contrary 
to what we think we have a right to expect if 
it is true that there really is a God, and that He 
is a God of justice and of grace and of love. 
Human life is full of sorrow, full of injustice, full 
of pain and withheld completion. Pure hopes 
are being blasted every day, and high ambitions 
being denied, and fine spirits withered. More 
often the wrong than the right wins the cause. 
The beautiful and the noble are cut off in their 
youth; the vicious and the useless live on to old 
age. Children suffer; women weep. The inno- 
cent are sacrificed; the guilty go free. Nature 
knows no compassion and makes no discrimina- 
tions. Like one vast and ruthless machine, the 
universe appears to go grinding on; and vice and 
virtue, aspiration and despair, seem to have no 
significance to any thing or any one except our- 
selves. How can any man who sees clearly the 
inscrutable injustice, the undeserved failures, the 

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unmerited sorrows of human existence, believe 
that behind it all, and dominating it, is a good 
and gracious and intelligent Spirit? The belief 
of primitive races in evil spirits seems to us 
intelligible enough. But can we, who know the 
world as it is, accept this concept of a holy and 
a loving God? 

We must answer, frankly, that to believe in 
Jesus' God and Jesus' faith, in the face of much 
that we know of human life and of universal 
workings, is a great achievement. It is difficult; 
it takes a high vision, or a sublime madness, as 
you may choose to call it. The difficulties of 
belief are enormous. There are times when to 
every one of us they seem to be insuperable. 
Yet, I candidly believe that the difficulties of 
unbelief are yet greater. Christianity rests, as 
all the important affirmations in human life rest, 
back on an hypothesis. You cannot prove it, 
as you can prove an empirical fact, nor demon- 
strate it, as you can demonstrate a mathe- 
matical problem. We just assume that God 
is, and that He is this kind of God, and that, 
therefore, everything in his universe must eventu- 
ally work out right. We assume that in the end 
He and we shall see of the travail of the soul and 
be satisfied. And this is what we mean by the 
word "faith," and by the insistance that faith 

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is indispensable to any real religion. But you 
are to remember that every view of the world 
rests back on faith; that Christianity is n't the 
only thing we have to take on trust. Every 
fundamental assumption in life is taken that way. 
We believe in the validity of human knowledge, 
but the belief is a pure assumption. We cannot 
prove it. We just trust that things are as they 
appear to be, and that trust would seem to be 
justified by the results that follow from our faith 
and by our increasing power to master the 
natural world. But we approach all phenomena 
of nature, taking for granted our fundamental 
assumptions regarding them, all of which are 
beyond any possible verification. 

Now, the same thing is true in the realm of 
religion. No man should be condemned or 
scoffed at because he assumes a mindless order, 
a dead world of atoms or electrons, a mechanical 
universe, in which you and I are the product of 
chance combinations, in which our aspirations 
and visions and faiths are mere tricks of the mind, 
curious actions and reactions of the chemistry of 
our natures. No man can prove that material- 
istic view. Its disciple holds it in precisely the 
same way that you hold your religious view. 
He takes it on faith. Such a view of the world, 
it may justly be said, transcends reason, al- 

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THE EXCEEDING DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 

though to the man who accepts it, it does not 
appear to go contrary to reason. And the only 
thing which Christianity asks of you is this: 
Since you have got to live by faith, anyway, it 
asks you to have faith in its view of the world. 
We cannot prove that view, neither can our 
opponents prove theirs. Belief in the Christian 
God is a leap in the dark. But all the funda- 
mental assumptions, upon which the entire 
structure of human life is built, are also leaps in 
the dark. There is much in human life which 
appears to refute our faith. But there is also 
much in human life which appears triumphantly 
to justify it. How are we to explain the saints 
and the prophets, the reformers and the heroes of 
the world, the noble army of martyrs, the men 
who have laid down their lives for an idea, and 
given up their breath for love? How can we 
explain the obstinate questionings, the persistent 
visions, the moral strife and agony of the world, 
the insatiable spiritual hunger, except on our 
hypothesis? Most of all, how are we to explain 
Jesus, and the serene power, the moral splendor 
of his life? And so, we call the chessboard black, 
we call it white. There is as much reason on 
a priori grounds for having faith in God as for 
not having faith in Him. More than that, when 
you consider the quality and potency of the 

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human life that has accepted our hypothesis and 
achieved our faith, we think there is, on the 
whole, more ground for believing than for not 
believing, and that the men who see life clearly 
and see it whole, torn as they are by its strifes 
and sorrows, yet find the difficulties of belief less 
than the difficulties of unbelief. Most of all, we 
say, you shall know our faith by its fruits if you 
will but try it. How does it work out? And we 
think it has been incontestably proved, in the 
history of the races dealing with Christianity, 
that they who do sincerely and faithfully believe 
in Jesus and his God live happier and freer and 
fuller lives, are more able to express their real 
selves, find the durable satisfactions of human 
experience, are of larger service to the race, have 
power in the present, and peace as they look into 
the future. So that here, verification by experi- 
ence justifies faith in the Christian view, in spite 
of its profound and abiding difficulties. 

And never forget what faith is. Faith is n't 
believing in things you know are n't so. Faith 
is not going contrary to one's reason, deliberately 
stultifying or ignoring the workings of the intel- 
lect. Faith is a sober and candid acceptance of 
a fundamental proposition which, indeed, is not 
demonstrable, which transcends the reasoning 
process, or, if you please, goes beyond the bounds 

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THE EXCEEDING DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 

of knowledge, but does not go contrary to known 
things. And faith is the common practice, the 
inevitable condition of all human life. It is as 
much a condition of action as the concepts of 
space and time are conditions of thinking. The 
difference between the Christian and the non- 
Christian is not the difference between the man 
who is weakly credulous and the man who holds 
his mind in vigorous and skeptical independence. 
It is purely the difference between two sorts of 
faith; faith in an ideal, intelligent world, full of 
beauty and truth and goodness, and faith in a 
mechanical, mindless order, concerning whose 
origin we have no theory to offer, concerning 
whose ultimate destiny we know nothing, and 
from which we may not hope for anything. 
2,. The third reason why men tend to lose their 
faith, in college, is because they confound 
religion and theology with each other. When 
their theology undergoes radical transitions, and 
they have, perhaps, to relinquish very much of 
it, they think that their religion must necessarily 
accompany it, and, as the Germans, in their 
quaint humor, say, they "throw out the baby 
with the bath." Religion is an experience of 
the inner life. It is our own personal awareness 
of God and self and sin; our own actual finding 
out, that when through Jesus we know God and 
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come to Him, sin is forgiven and we are set free. 
That is n't a theory or a philosophy or a science. 
It is a fact in human life, which generation after 
generation of men have known for themselves. 
It does n't admit of argument, it just is. Now, 
theology takes the facts of the religious experi- 
ence and codifies and relates them, puts them in 
logical order, gives labels to them, explains their 
inferences, and fits this portion of our experience 
into the whole of our lives, sets these facts in 
their right perspective and place in any given 
view of the world. Theology has the same rela- 
tion to religion that botany has to flowers or that 
physics and chemistry have to the material 
universe. Theology, then, is a science, of which 
religion is the corresponding art. Theology is a 
philosophy, religion the life which furnishes the 
material for that philosophy. Now, the life, the 
experience, the art of religion, are essentially 
unchanging. Where they change at all, it is 
very slowly, with practically imperceptible modi- 
fications in each generation. 

But the science of religion changes markedly, 
as in each succeeding century men know more 
and more of themselves, and more of the world 
in which they live. All sciences change radically, 
unless they are dead sciences. As long as theol- 
ogy remains vital and potent, it will remain fluid 

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THE EXCEEDING DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 

and progressive. Let me illustrate this. Al- 
ways there have been the suns and moons, the 
stars and planets, all the splendor of the firma- 
ment by night. That's an incontestable and 
unchanging fact of our material world. It has 
always been a part of man's experience. Now, 
we used to have a science of that firmament, and 
a quaint and picturesque science it was. It was 
called the science of astrology, and to it we owe 
the sportive signs of the zodiac. We used to 
believe that if a man was born under the planet 
Venus, he was an affectionate creature; or under 
Mars, he was a savage brute; or under Jupiter, 
he was a headstrong lad. Now, the whole science 
of astrology is as dead as dead can be. It was 
all wrong. There was nothing in it. Nobody 
but quacks and old women and some business 
men believe in it. But the firmament still 
remains. And now we have a new science of 
astronomy, and that, too, has been undergoing 
an important modification in the last fifty years, 
and its leaders are now engaged in certain ardent 
and most interesting controversies. In a sense, 
indeed, it is true that the sciences are always 
changing because the facts have always been 
there, and the changes themselves indicate that 
the facts are permanent and real. 

Now, precisely the same thing is true of 
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religion and its corresponding science of theology. 
Down through two thousand years men have 
been working at the indubitable and transform- 
ing facts of the Christian experience. They have 
tried to state those facts in the language of their 
own generation. They have spoken of them, 
from the point of view of their own day. They 
have related them to the view of the world, of 
their time. They have given to them such 
varying emphases as the tendencies and needs 
of any given generation appeared to warrant. 
And, meanwhile, men's views of the world have 
been changing, men's chief points of need have 
somewhat shifted, men's ideas of God and man 
have enormously enlarged and clarified. And 
so, of course, their science of man's experience 
of God and of himself in God has changed and 
clarified, too. That is wholly desirable and quite 
to be expected. A science of religion, for in- 
stance, which presupposed that the Ptolemaic 
conception of the universe would be radically 
different from a science which presupposed the 
Copernican system; or, to come nearer home, a 
science of our religion built upon a dualistic 
philosophy would be quite unlike a science of 
that religion worked out when most men are, 
consciously or instinctively, monists. 

Therefore, it comes about that when you go 
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THE EXCEEDING DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 

to college and are introduced to a twentieth 
century view of the world, and find that many 
of the intellectual expressions of your religion 
are couched in a fifteenth or a sixteenth or a 
seventeenth or eighteenth century view of the 
world, then those intellectual expressions of 
religion seem to you unreal and inadequate, and 
to some extent they undoubtedly are. But that 
does n't mean that religion is unreal or fallacious 
or outgrown. It only means that you need to 
bring your science of religion up to date. Nor 
does it mean — and this, I think, it is particu- 
larly valuable to say to youth — that all the 
venerable and impressive statements of faith, 
although they are, to some extent, intellectually 
outgrown, are nevertheless valueless. On the 
contrary, they are of enormous value, both as 
testimonies to the faith of our fathers and as 
milestones marking the progress of the race 
in its search for a rational and intelligible ex- 
pression of spiritual truth. The Declaration of 
Independence is a product, partly of French 
sentimentalism, and partly of eighteenth-cen- 
tury political science. Few of us believe its 
opening statement, that all men are created 
equal. None of us would want to take that 
Declaration as a political creed for the United 
States of this century, or make a mechanical 

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acceptance of it the test of political orthodoxy. 
But all of us revere and love it, and we know it 
is a great asset in our national life. We should 
justly protest if it were not still read upon each 
Fourth of July, to both the citizens and the 
children of this Republic. It was our first con- 
fession of national consciousness and faith; and 
it marked the beginning of a mighty era in the 
affairs of this continent. Now, there are similar 
corporate confessions of the Christian Church, 
notably the great creeds of Christendom, such 
as the Athanasian, the Nicsean, the Apostles' 
Creed, so-called. They are witnesses to the 
vigorous and potent religious life of our distant 
forbears. They mark mighty and significant 
advances in intellectual apprehension of religious 
truth. There were platforms, intellectual bonds 
of union, spiritual confessions, which held to- 
gether the Republic of God, and under their ban- 
ners it fought gloriously against the world, the 
flesh, and the devil. They have conserved and 
transmitted, from generation to generation, some 
of the most precious experiences of our human 
race. Therefore, we love to hear them read, or 
we love reverently to recite them, for just the 
same reasons that we love to hear the Declaration 
of Independence read. They are not mechanical 
tests of our intellectual apprehension of truth. 
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THE EXCEEDING DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 

As scientific documents they do, indeed, appear 
to us to be extraordinarily able, having clear and 
amazing insights into the nature of God and the 
needs of humanity. Yet, of course, they are 
mistaken, and, of course, they are deficient, in 
part; for they come from somewhere about 
the third century, and we are the children of 
the twentieth century, and, mighty as were the 
minds who conceived those subtle, pregnant 
phrases, even they could not project themselves 
seventeen centuries beyond their time. We are, 
therefore, able to honor such creeds without 
mechanically accepting them, and, indeed, we 
believe that we are true to the intellectual power, 
the spiritual daring of their framers, when we 
push on beyond them, rather than cling to them. 
And so you will find it true of much of your 
inherited science of religion, that it will need 
large modifications and restatements. Some 
things you will add to it, other things you will 
drop from it, as your view of doctrines changes, 
as this age makes its own statement of what it 
believes to be the nature of God and man and 
Christ and their relations one to another. But 
do not let this readjustment of your intellectual 
apprehension of religious truth dim the sense of 
the reality of that experience to which all this 
science is but the witness and of which it is but 

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4 



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the expression. There is a ponderous and an- 
tique phrase, I think it is Tertullian's, which sums 
up the whole principle: "Mutation of emphasis," 
he says, "involves no invasion of substance." 

Never permit yourselves, then, to suppose that 
you need to cease to be a Christian because your 
inherited dogmas, the traditional formulae of 
Christianity, are no longer entirely acceptable. 
Only discard them when, in so doing, you gain 
the freedom to come nearer to, and learn more 
of, the spiritual things of life. Still retain and 
cherish the experience of God in Jesus. Still 
rest on the impregnable fact of the moral power 
and the spiritual insight which personal com- 
munion with the Almighty has brought to you. 
Still will to do the will of God, and then you shall 
know the doctrine. Then, perhaps, you shall 
be among those who shall help you remake that 
doctrine, in glowing and effective utterance, for 
your time and generation. 

The fourth and final reason why we sometimes 
lose our faith, in college, is personal and moral. 
Often, for instance, it is atrophied through dis- 
use; we lose it just because we won't employ it. 
Moral inertia, spiritual laziness, beset us. The 
many distractions of college life crowd out the 
quieter and the finer things. The good is the 
worst enemy of our best. Therefore, we don't 

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THE EXCEEDING DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 

live up to what we do believe. We don't exer- 
cise our faith; hence it pines away. One will 
never get more experience of religion until one 
has used to the utmost all that one has, even as 
one never grows in mental power until the mind 
has worked hard; and never increases in physical 
strength until every muscle is exercised to the 
utmost. Very many young men take their 
religion for granted and pay no serious attention 
to it, and then are surprised that they have so 
little of it. There is no small amount of religious 
doubt, so called, in college, which has no right 
to be dignified by that honorable name. It is 
nothing more or less than spiritual ignorance and 
mental triviality. It is not a thing of which to 
be proud; it is a thing of which to be ashamed. 
In the previous paragraphs of this chapter, we 
have been dealing with the great battlefields of 
faith, where strong men, and good men and true, 
on both sides of the contest, wage an honest 
fight. But the undergraduate doubt, which is 
born of religious indifference and intellectual 
laziness, has no place on those great fields. What 
this kind of skeptic needs is to take himself and 
his world more seriously, and he would do well to 
beware lest the world and life be as cavalier with 
him as he now is with them. 

Again, there are many men who appear to be 
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unable to begin the religious life because they 
think they are n't good enough. This is one of 
the inhibitions which grows out of the invincible 
modesty of youth. I think we ought to add, 
however, such is the amazing inconsistency of 
human nature, that this quite veritable modesty 
sometimes goes hand in hand with a very vigor- 
ous self-conceit. These men apparently look 
upon the Church, or the college Christian Asso- 
ciation, as being graduate schools for saints. But 
they are n't. They are rather kindergartens for 
sinners, and most of us could qualify quite easily 
in them. To call yourself a disciple of Jesus 
does n't mean that you know, but that you want 
to know; it does n't mean that you are now 
good; it means that you really desire to be good. 
Every man who goes out in the autumn for 
football does not, thereby, set himself up, in a 
superior manner, before the college, as claiming 
to be a proficient athlete. Nobody thinks that 
trying for a team implies athletic prominence 
or physical conceit. But a man becomes a 
disciple of football or baseball, and he goes out 
with the crowd and tries to follow his leader, and 
to learn, and grow through the trials which may 
confront him. So it is with following Jesus. 
To call yourself his disciple does not mean that 
you are a holier-than-thou person, or that you 

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THE EXCEEDING DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 

are making the slightest claim to knowing very 
much about Him now. It only means that you 
would like to believe in Him, that you want to 
know Him, that you are going to try to follow 
Him. 

And, once more, there are men who lose their 
faith, or who won't try to create a faith, not 
because they think themselves unworthy of the 
Church or of the Christian Association, but 
because they think these institutions are not 
good enough for them. They have a keen eye 
for the pious sinner, the canting hypocrite, and 
the youthful prig. They see a great many more 
of them in the world than actually exist; for 
these are all rare types. They jeer at the 
reactionaries and obscurantists in the ecclesiasti- 
cal ranks; they see the inertia, and the conserv- 
atism of the Church — all the defects that are 
too apt to accompany an ancient institution. 
To be sure, the Church has survived the chances 
and changes of two thousand years; has seen 
the ancient empires around the Mediterranean 
wane and vanish; has persisted through all the 
climatic, social, political, and economic changes 
of the modern world. But they think that now 
her day is about done, and they prefer to stand 
outside and rail at her, rather than come inside 
and help her. 

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Well, it is true that she has plenty of defects. 
The laity are the only material for her clergy, 
and men like her critics are the only material for 
her laity. For long she conceived of herself as 
an ark of salvation to which the elect withdrew 
from a perishing and somewhat contemptible 
world. Sometimes she has lived off the com- 
munity, rather than for it; and has been more 
concerned with the conserving of her prestige 
and the perpetuation of her organization than 
with the service of her day and generation. To 
the social and industrial strife of the moment 
she was not over-ready to apply the teaching of 
Jesus, nor, as she contemplated the comfortable, 
bourgeois aristocracy which filled her pews, was 
she too eager to socialize her ethics. Yet to-day, 
as in every day, she is doing the difficult, the 
patient, and the steadfast service in the com- 
munity. She is bringing to the modern state 
what no other organization can bring — its 
spiritual dynamic, its vision of a purified and 
glorified humanity, made one with itself in God. 
Down through the centuries, for all her pride of 
place and lust for power, for all her follies and 
mistakes, the Church has been the chief factor 
in the civilizing of our western world. 

Did you ever see a boy who was born of poor 
parents, ignorant, hard-working folk, who had 

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THE EXCEEDING DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 

deformed their hands by toil, and turned their 
nights into day, to clothe him and feed him and 
warm him, and send him to school? And when 
he grew up, strong and able because of these 
advantages which they had lovingly and patiently 
gotten for him, they sent him to college and gave 
their love and their tears and their prayers, their 
time and effort and all their substance, for him 
and his advantage. They grew old and broken, 
and gray and bent, they were dull and uncouth 
and unlettered, not used to the polite and gra- 
cious ways of life, and yet they gave all they had 
to him, and lost their lives in his. And he went 
through the graduate school, and he became, let 
us say, a polished and a brilliant lawyer; he 
lived in a large world, in a dignified and formal 
and comfortable house, among well-mannered 
and sophisticated and highly intelligent people. 
And he forgot his old father and mother; he was 
rather ashamed of them, anyway, for their 
lapses of language were intolerable, their views 
of the world absurd, and they did n't know how 
to dress. They were 'way behind the times. 
And they could n't do very much for him now, 
and he did n't want to be identified with them. 
He wished they were well out of the way. Did 
you ever see such a boy? What would you 
think of him? Well, the Church is your mother, 

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my friends. She is the venerable and patient 
mother of us all. She has transmitted the hope 
of the race, the belief in the indefectible worth 
and honor of human nature, the vision of the 
good and gracious God. She saved, in her 
monasteries and churches, the remnants of the 
ancient learning in the awful wreck and break-up 
of great empires. She kept the torch of truth 
alight and made life tolerable and decent in the 
turbulent and decentralized days of feudalism. 
She sent her missionaries to our savage ancestors, 
who were offering their human sacrifices in the 
dark forests of Germany and Great Britain. 
She founded our schools and colleges, and 
created and organized our philanthropies, and 
herself sowed the seeds of democracy. Our 
country, our colleges, our homes, all the refuges 
of our lives we owe to her. Out from her capa- 
cious life have these things issued. And, in times 
of dreadful storms and stress, when body and 
mind and spirit have almost gone under and 
whole races of men have been in despair, she has 
gathered them to herself in sublime self-abnega- 
tion and in her bosom they have found shelter 
and peace. She is an ancient and venerable 
mother. She is worn with the strifes and the 
labors, the anguish, the effort, and the vision of 
many generations. She is slow to change, and 
146 



THE EXCEEDING DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 

she is conservative in temper, and she does 
demand great things of us, and sometimes we 
have to have patience with our ancient mother. 
But when there are great moral issues on, and 
fights to be won, and sacrifices to be made, again 
she gathers up her ancient strength and lifts her 
gray head, and still she goes on ahead, and still 
men come after her. And what shall we do, my 
brothers, we, who are her children, we, whom she 
has nourished and brought into the world, we, 
who owe our all to what she has been and done? 
Shall we rail at her, laugh at her, desert her, be 
ashamed of her? Or shall we stand by her, as 
she has ever stood by our fathers and by us? 



CHAPTER VI 

RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

We come, now, to the last of our discussions of 
the religious problem of the undergraduate. We 
have tried to make clear what the religious in- 
stinct is, and to describe and commend that 
particular explanation and expression of it known 
as Christianity. Particularly we have tried to 
show how Christianity is not a form of words or 
of ideas, but a form of power, a moral dynamic, 
which accompanies the experience of reconcilia- 
tion with God and ourselves and men, brought 
about by faith in the person and teaching of 
Jesus. We have also looked at this Christian 
experience in the light of its history in the world, 
and at the difficulties which have beset it, and 
we have reviewed the chief causes which have 
seemed to make it impossible for many good and 
able men to accept its teaching. 

Now, neither of these previous chapters will 
have fulfilled their purpose unless they have 
made you see how natural and how universal a 
phenomenon religion is; how normal and benef- 
icent are its operations, and how precious its 
rewards, as it enlarges the horizons of life, and 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

imparts, to the most insignificant activities of 
daily living, abiding values and continuous in- 
spiration. Starting, then, from this assertion of 
the indispensableness of religion, its natural and 
central place in a normal and completed life, we 
take up the theme of this chapter, and inquire, 
If religion be thus important, just what place 
should it hold in the student's life; what is the 
relation between learning and the cultivation of 
the spirit? 

As we try to answer that question, we may 
say, first, and in general, that men have always 
perceived that there is a natural and intimate 
connection between the discipline of the mind 
and the cultivation of the spirit. Churches and 
schools stand close together in the history of 
western Europe and of our own nation, and have, 
indeed, for the most part, been inseparable. 
Few things are more striking among contempo- 
rary tendencies in America than the growing 
sense in this Republic that religion and learning, 
education and piety, cannot be permanently and 
successfully kept apart. 

Our public school system is built upon the 
principle of the separation of Church and State. 
It has appeared to be a corollary of that princi- 
ple that no sort of religious instruction should 
be given under state or federal auspices. We 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

have to-day, all through the Middle West, the 
truly amazing sight of a system of education 
which, from the kindergarten to the graduate 
school, cultivates everything in the individual 
except his spirit, and, to a large extent, ignores 
that portion of the personality where ideals are 
formed, convictions originate, and motives take 
their rise. But here in the East, where our 
secular school system has been tried out longer, 
it is significant to see how the sense of the com- 
munity is endeavoring, by means of private 
enterprise, to supplement its spiritual impoverish- 
ment. On the one hand, we have the parochial 
schools of the Homan Catholic communion, 
maintained by taxpayers who are already sup- 
porting the public school system, for the express 
purpose of insuring that religion and scholarship 
shall not be dissociated for their children. On 
the other hand, we have, in Protestant communi- 
ties, the rapid increase in the expensive private 
fitting school, one of whose chief reasons for 
commending itself to the public is that it offers 
religious instruction and church privileges, to- 
gether with secular learning; and this school 
also is supported by those who are already paying 
for the public instruction of their children by the 
State. One sometimes wonders what is to be 
the future of the public school in these Eastern 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

States, with the best elements of both the 
Catholic and the Protestant communities steadily 
being withdrawn from it. Under such circum- 
stances, it cannot continue to be the nursery of 
American democracy that it once was. Cer- 
tainly, this withdrawal indicates, among other 
things, the conviction on the part of mature men 
and women that the education of the spirit is at 
least as valuable as the training of the body and 
the mind. It indicates that we are beginning to 
see that the best which a purely secular educa- 
tion can do for a youth is to acquaint him with 
the uniform workings of the world, the laws of 
nature and life, and that it is quite as necessary, 
both for himself and for society, that his will 
should be disciplined as well, to conform itself to 
the laws which the mind perceives. It is not, 
then, without significance that the three com- 
manding physical expressions of school and uni- 
versity life in the Eastern States are the chapel, 
the library, and the gymnasium. For all three 
of these supplement each other, and naturally 
belong together in the making of a man. 

And yet, some of us always, and all of us 
sometimes, feel a little distrust of too close an 
alliance between piety and scholarship, and that 
distrust is, probably, most active at the under- 
graduate's time of life. There are three groups 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

of men in college, two of them approaching the 
question from the point of view of the religionist, 
and one of them from the point of view of the 
scholar, who agree in opposing and disliking a 
close mutual dependence between scholarship and 
religion. 

The first of these groups is probably the 
largest in the college. It consists of those men 
in whom the religious experience, by reason of 
previous environment or inheritance, has natu- 
rally expressed itself in traditional forms and 
conventional convictions. The devotional and 
practical uses of Scripture have been exalted 
in their minds. The historic postulates and 
creeds of Christianity have been regarded as 
sufficient and obligatory upon the present be- 
liever. But when the youth comes up to the 
college of liberal arts, he is plunged at once into 
an impartial, exacting, austerely intellectual 
atmosphere. He finds the air of the classroom 
cool and cautious and neutral, and its spirit 
sufficiently sterile and frigid. If he enters any 
one of half a dozen courses in the departments of 
natural science, history, psychology, or philos- 
ophy, there critical research, comparative study, 
a new historical method, a modern view of the 
world, all appear maliciously to combine to pull 
his house of faith about his ears. Symbols 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

and doctrines, precious from earliest childhood, 
and identified by him with his moral victo- 
ries and his spiritual achievements, are ruthlessly 
swept aside. The external habits of piety, to 
which he has been accustomed in his guides and 
teachers, may be largely absent from his in- 
structors in the classroom. These men seem to 
him to live in another world, which recognizes 
few of the values of his world, which, if it prizes 
at all the inner life, finds far from obvious 
channels for its expression. How lonely, indeed, 
how terrified and bewildered, many an unsophis- 
ticated and sensitive lad has been, as he has faced 
the specters of his mind during the rapid develop- 
ment of his college years. We do not wonder if 
he reacts against the learning which appears to be 
the enemy of the spirit. We do not condemn 
him if he rails against what seems to him to be a 
complacent intellectualism, or if he adopts the 
old vicious antithesis between spirituality and 
science, the scholar and the seer. Rather, we 
who teach wonder whether by carelessness or 
indifference we have obscured what we should 
illumine. I suppose the most important quali- 
fication for a teacher of immature minds is the 
having of a just scale of values, the knowing how 
to keep first things first when talking and teach- 
ing in the classroom. Sometimes the teacher 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

obscures the truth with technical language, or 
by abstract and pedantic presentation. Some- 
times we are too worldly-wise, or so provincial 
in our own view of life that, as we teach the 
truth, we fail to convey with it the spiritual 
glory which is its natural accompaniment and 
attestation in any department of human knowl- 
edge. Perhaps we too far divorce our science 
or our philosophy from those human origins and 
those specific applications which chiefly commend 
and interpret it to immature minds. But, 
however far we may have failed in our teaching, 
we never for a moment doubt, nor must we let 
youth doubt, that the severest scholarship, the 
purest learning, are indispensable to true religion, 
and they are never incompatible with it. We 
hear a good deal, nowadays, about the abuse of 
special privilege, and we are seeing the deter- 
mined efforts being made by state and federal 
governments to wipe out special privilege, as it 
is found in the commercial, the political, and the 
industrial world. But one of the greatest sinners 
in the use of special privileges has been the 
Christian Church. For long she claimed that the 
canons of judgment which men were allowed to 
exercise in every other department of their lives 
must not be brought to bear upon her; that her 
dicta were to be accepted, not questioned; and 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

that if what she declared to be true appeared to 
be disproved by the known truth in some other 
department of human life and effort, still her 
commands and decisions were to be accepted and 
obeyed. Men have even gone so far as to feel 
and to assert that where religious conviction and 
pure knowledge appeared to clash, why then so 
much the worse for pure knowledge! And, even 
as we are learning how dangerous a thing it is for 
the State and for commerce and industry and the 
social well-being of the community to permit spe- 
cial privileges to flourish in the nation, so we have 
also learned that it is equally dangerous for the 
cause of true religion. To favor scientific re- 
search everywhere else, but to discourage it in 
the realm of man's permanent interests, where his 
origin and his destiny are concerned, would be 
only less fatal for religion than for him who 
believes in it. No one, indeed, will ever under- 
stand the reality and the power of the spiritual 
life unless he values religion too highly and 
believes in it too profoundly ever for a moment 
to adopt the point of view of a pietistic obscur- 
antism. Religion is too inclusive and too in- 
finitely precious to the race ever to be given over 
to the mere custody of the instinct and the emo- 
tions. To be unwilling to submit our spiritual 
convictions and religious faiths to the most 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

searching inquiry and criticism is to confess that 
in our heart of hearts we are afraid of the results 
of that experiment, and are, like John Henry 
Newman, unconscious and fundamental skeptics. 
The very cornerstone of a true religious belief 
is the assertion that truth and God cannot be 
found apart, and that there is nothing real in one 
department of the universe which can ever alter 
or diminish the realities of another. 

Indeed, a sincere and candid scholarship is 
not only morally obligatory upon the believer, 
but it is the most able champion of a free and 
rational piety. This is well illustrated in the 
case of the authority of the Christian Scriptures. 
The Church has always believed in the inspira- 
tion of the Bible, and has made it a rule of faith 
and practice for her children. Most of us were 
brought up under one or another of several 
theories of that inspiration which were formu- 
lated during the Protestant Reformation, and 
which, in their most extreme and mechanical 
expressions, issued from the Swiss reformer, 
Zwingli, and his followers. These theories set 
forth, in general, that the entire content of the 
Hebrew and Christian Scriptures was given by 
the dictation of God; that they are of a flat and 
equal inspiration from cover to cover, and may 
be said to have possessed originally a verbal 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

inerrancy. Now, no man can go through college 
to-day and be taught any just historical method, 
any just canons of literary criticism, or any 
adequate theistic philosophy, and maintain that 
view. We soon learn, therefore, that our teachers 
do not regard the Bible as inerrant; they do not 
believe it has a flat and equal inspiration from 
cover to cover; and they would not for a moment 
dream of accepting it as an authoritative guide 
either in natural science or in history. 

What, then, shall the devout student do? 
Shall he condemn as impious the learning which 
shatters his traditional convictions and refuse 
to apply that learning to his religious life? 
Shall he keep in a closed compartment, so to 
speak, that portion of his experience? If he 
does so, he commits a moral and intellectual 
misdemeanor which is as foolish as it is indefen- 
sible. Shall he, on the other hand, rashly throw 
away his whole belief in the authority of Scrip- 
ture, and, without further investigation or any 
clear grounds for his action, adopt a superficial 
and unintelligent skepticism? Again, he will be 
guilty of both moral and intellectual wrongdoing. 
But what he ought to do is to say, "I am a 
beginning scholar, and revere myself as such. 
I am here to get at the truth, and the whole truth, 
and nothing but the truth. Both the opportu- 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

nity and the obligation are mine to discover 
why my learning and my faith appear to be 
hopelessly divergent in this important matter." 
And then, by virtue of his very scholarship, if 
only, on the one hand, he will not despise it, and 
on the other hand, will be thorough in the use 
of it, he will find that the new learning does not 
destroy his faith, but, on the contrary, greatly re- 
inforces it, and gives to it a new foundation. For 
he will discover that what modern scholarship 
does is not to deny the inspiration of Scrip- 
ture, but to restate the theory of that inspira- 
tion; and to rest the proof of it on internal, not 
external, witness, and to account for it by natural 
and logical, not supernatural and arbitrary, 
processes. Those who know the Bible best 
to-day, who have the most intelligent and 
accurate understanding of it, who can distinguish 
in its compilations, its various authors and 
editors, and can re-date its manuscripts, are 
precisely those who most believe in it. It is 
they who have given us the new theory of 
inspiration, and the tenable theory. The scholar 
is the champion, not the destroyer, of the faith, 
for he says: "I know that the Bible is inspired, 
not because God dictated it, not because miracles 
or predictions are found in it, not because it is, 
or ever has been, inerrant; but because it 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

inspires me." Being an inspiring book, of course 
it is inspired. As Coleridge said, "I believe in 
the Bible, because it finds me at greater depths 
and heights than any other book." 
1 1 It is precisely the scholar, who can to-day best 
assert the authority of the Scripture. He 
declares that its ethical and spiritual teachings 
are true, and rests the proof of that assertion, 
not on the dictum of a church or a council, not 
on the authority of a great tradition, but back 
upon human nature itself. For the Bible has 
commended itself as true to the experience of 
successive generations of men, down through the 
ages. All sorts and kinds of men, under all sorts 
of social, economic, intellectual conditions, have 
found truth in it. Therefore, by the witness of 
the experience of the race, it is known to be true. 
It does not claim for itself, and for the most part 
the Church has never claimed for it, that it 
contains inspired historical and scientific material. 
But it does claim for itself, and the experience 
of the world has amply supported that claim, 
that it reveals the life of God and the heart of a 
man, each to the other, as does no other literature 
of the world. 

Modern scholarship, then, has here, as in a 
hundred other places, done infinite service to 
religion by its restatement of the nature of the 

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inspiration and the extent of the authority of 
Holy Scripture. Such attacks upon the Bible, 
for instance, as were widely and brilliantly made 
by the late Colonel Ingersoll would have been 
futile if scholarship had been allowed to come to 
the defense of Scripture in his day. For his 
criticism of the Bible was based chiefly upon a 
theory of its origin and a conception of its nature 
which scholarship has shown to be quite beside 
the point. The Christian scholar, to-day, re- 
gards the Bible as the imperfect record of an 
ascending spiritual evolution; the vivid history 
of the growing experience of God in the race of 
Israel; the race which above all others was 
richly endowed with religious genius. This 
spiritual evolution reaches its culmination in the 
great prophets Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and 
Jeremiah, and finally comes to a perfect fruition 
in the teaching and person of the Lord Jesus, by 
whom all that comes before and after Him, in 
the record, is to be judged. And we believe and 
accept this incomparable teaching, not because 
it comes down to us with the authority of the 
past, but because it searches and finds, illumines 
and empowers, the present. We do not believe 
a thing is true because it is in the Bible. We 
are on far safer ground than that; we believe 
in the Bible because we know it to be true. 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

Here, then, is a very familiar instance of the 
value of the new science of history, of the new 
methods of literary criticism and of the new view 
of the world, as allies of sincere and intelligent 
religion. Here, as elsewhere, learning has not 
been the foe of the spirit, but has given to our 
faith a new expression, a new interpretation, 
and a new apologetic. 

But there is another group of men in the 
college who depreciate the patient and indirect 
processes of scholarship, and think them not too 
necessary for the religious life. There are to be 
found, in the modern college, many young men 
who are chiefly conspicuous for their ethical 
idealism. Their interests are not abstract, but 
concrete; not academic, but practical. And 
they themselves have devout rather than alert 
minds. These men are lovable and humane 
spirits. They are keenly aware of the sorrow 
and the sin and the injustice of this present 
world, and anxious to devote their lives to 
remedial and preventive service. Through their 
various businesses or professions, they mean, 
when college days are over, to aid their world 
rather than to exploit it. These are the men 
who have made the term "social service" one 
of the watchwords of the twentieth-century col- 
lege. But very few of these men appear to 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

reflect that the value of social service is largely 
determined by the maturity and efficiency of the 
servant; and that all any one has to serve with 
is himself. On the contrary, they are more 
attracted by the ardent and generous ideal of 
immediate benefactions than by scrupulous and 
severe preparation for a more significant and 
difficult service in the future. These men are 
among the most lovable and the most exasperat- 
ing of the types to be found in the present college. 
They have less intellectual than moral integrity. 
They can scarcely be said to value adequately 
specific intellectual convictions or a thorough 
scholastic equipment. On the contrary, they, 
appear to think that the noblest idea of the 
college course is that it exists for a general culture, 
to be infused with moral and religious earnest- 
ness, for social ends. Hence, they have far more 
conscience about conduct than they have about 
scholarship. They realize the moral obligation 
to be good. They do not realize the moral 
obligation to be intelligent. These men look 
askance at nearly all advanced or very technical 
training, and are loath to recognize the value of 
such studies as bear only indirectly upon the 
practical issues of life. Why read the Greek and 
Latin classics, when our fellow citizens wait to 
be taught the rudiments of the English tongue? 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

Why be occupied with experiments in natural 
science, why study psychology and metaphysics, 
and be put through the drill of higher mathe- 
matics, when there are mouths to feed, and feet 
to be shod, and bodies to be warmed, and tears 
to be wiped away? The chief thing is not the 
ornament of learning, but the man. Yes, of 
course, that 's true. But this group sums up 
the man almost wholly in terms of moral vigor, 
personal attractiveness, and social helpfulness. 
It underrates the gray matter. One must con- 
fess there is something a little wearying and 
disappointing in the almost undivided allegiance 
which youth gives to the immediate, the obvious, 
and the practical. 

But, of course, the men who belong to this 
group are restless during their four college 
years. They feel the narrowing isolation of the 
academic walls. Sometimes religious and phil- 
anthropic associations exploit this intellectual 
distaste of ethically ideal youth, and are not 
unwilling prematurely to exhaust their precious 
human material. So these half -prepared scholars, 
these near-students, are called away from the 
library and the student lamp, to secretarial, 
administrative, even teaching, positions. There 
are many promising and popular young men who 
are unable to perceive that the chiefcause of 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

their favored standing in the community, and 
their only real asset now, is the mere accident 
of their youth. Hence, they underrate the 
severe intellectual preparation which develops 
those less picturesque but more solid powers, 
which will deepen and abide after the fervor and 
the fever of youth have passed away. A few 
years ago, Dr. Francis Greenwood Peabody, 
most justly pointed out that it is the great mis- 
take of American life that "feeling and action are 
crowding out of the foreground of interest the 
function of thought; piety and efficiency are 
being made substitutes for intellectual power." 
Now the passion for service is a poor passion if 
it supplants the passion for truth. No man is 
competent to lead his generation in any ideal 
way till he has matured and disciplined his mind 
as well as his spirit. Premature engagement in 
the activities of life, to the deliberate neglect of 
the intellectual equipment for those activities, 
means that the student is bankrupting his future, 
and, all unconsciously, exploiting his own youth. 
And I am most concerned to say a word to 
any man reading these pages, who may be 
looking forward to some professional form of 
ethical or spiritual leadership in his generation, 
You of all men should revere learning, and 
aim at scholarship. It will be well for the 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

future of organized religion in this country if 
every young man, who is looking forward to 
associating himself with it, could be made to 
understand that a general culture, religious 
earnestness, ability to talk attractively and 
effectively on the common duties of life, are quite 
insufficient in themselves for that type of ethical 
and spiritual leadership which this generation is 
demanding. Do not let yourselves forget that 
in every age men have demanded far more than 
ethical counsel and practical helpfulness from 
their spiritual advisers. They have insisted that 
these men should direct them in their search for 
light on the great speculative questions regarding 
the origin and the destiny of the race and the 
nature of the human heart. The weakness of the 
Christian Church to-day is not in the quantity 
but the quality of her leaders. There are enough 
of them, such as they are. It is not so much 
enthusiastic as expert service that we need. 

And this is almost equally true in every other 
department of human effort. In the old days of 
picturesque warfare, the general was the man 
who in brilliant uniform and with flashing sword, 
astride his foaming charger, waved high the 
standard, and cried, — 

"On, ye Brave 
Who rush to glory, or the grave!" 
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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

Then he galloped ahead, followed by a wildly 
cheering multitude. Such a man would be a 
confounded nuisance and an arrant failure in any 
strife of modern times. To-day we want the 
general who knows, not does; who knows mili- 
tary tactics and strategy; who knows his men, 
and the enemy, and the intimate topography of 
the field; and who on his distant hill has a cleffr, 
whole view of it, so that, with the unerring 
precision of the expert, he moves his armies like 
pawns upon a chessboard hither and yon. I 
trust you see the meaning of the illustration. 
The more generous your ideals of life, the more 
unselfish your aims, the more religious your 
spirit, the more eager you should be for the 
indispensable ally of a developed and disciplined 
intellect, which shall give steadiness and intelli- 
gence to your enthusiasm, wisdom and inclusive- 
ness to your endeavors. 

But there is a third group of men to be found 
in the college, who regard the alliance between 
piety and learning from precisely the opposite 
point of view. They have a sort of intellectual 
contempt for religion. It belongs to women and 
children and ministers, to romantic and senti- 
mental people, to emotional and illogical beings. 
It was of great value to the childhood of the race, 
and is of value now to the individual, in his 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

childish days, but surely a negligible factor for 
the college man. Sometimes its chief value to 
this group of men is that it offers so much material 
for flippant comment and inexpensive wit. It 
was long ago noted that the sublime lies very 
near to the ridiculous; and there are always men 
who are not unwilling to take advantage of that 
fact, and who would sacrifice a conviction for an 
epigram, an ideal for a bon mot. So the men 
in this group are not at all concerned lest in- 
sufficient devotion be mingled with their learn- 
ing. They are rather of the opinion that their 
scholarship will be more single-minded, more 
veritable and effective, if it is quite divorced 
from either the public or the private exercises of 
piety during their four undergraduate years. 

It must be said that one is often struck with 
the nobility of the motives which may lie behind 
this apparently hard and contemptuous attitude. 
One of those motives is a fine passion for the 
truth, and the determination to make the most 
of the opportunity to find it. A man has made 
sacrifices, both personal and material, in order 
to gain his four years' academic residence. He 
has now that most rare and precious thing in the 
American world — leisure for intellectual pur- 
suits. He is having what is probably his only 
chance to drink deep at the fount of learning. 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

Surely, then, the library, the study, the labora- 
tory, and the seminar room may be exalted high 
above the chapel. He will always have the 
Church; he cannot always have the college. 
Again, it is often the passion for intellectual 
integrity and ethical sincerity which lies behind 
this deliberate and contemptuous neglect of the 
spiritual life. In the churches or schools from 
which the youth has come, intellectual freedom 
and moral independence have not always been 
associated with organized religion. In college, 
therefore, fired by that passion for reality and 
honesty, which is one of the noblest things in the 
young life, he reacts from all the external obser- 
vances and pious practices which serve to remind 
him of abandoned intellectual expediencies, and 
seem to bring him back into the atmosphere of 
timid obscurantism. 

And then there is another factor, too. We 
have all of us seen youth in college who were so 
good that there was something positively in- 
decent about them. Theirs was an unnatural 
virtue. They were too good to be true. Or we 
have seen youth of the sort whom Phillips 
Brooks remembered, from his days at Alexandria; 
lads who could exhort and pray with one another, 
at the college prayer meeting, until their very 
natures seemed on fire, but who, assembled in 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

the classroom on the next morning, were found 
to be dullards and sluggards when viewed in the 
garish light of common day. Their devotion 
and their duty were divorced. Their religion was 
neither a sanction nor a standard for their daily 
work. Such men always arouse, in their more 
normal fellows, a healthy and a merited contempt 
and often induce in them distaste for all religious 
forms and observances. And then behind it all 
there is, I dare say, a temperamental reason. 
The scholar is by nature cool, cautious, critical. 
The devotee is by nature warm, eager, imagina- 
tive. Those personal qualities, therefore, which 
induce dependence upon and delight in personal 
religion and public worship are the reverse of the 
ones which lead men to the lonely and con- 
centrated and colorless efforts of the mind. 

It is quite to be expected, then, in these four 
years, when scholastic interests are naturally to 
the front, that, in many of the really brilliant 
youth of the college, delight in and dependence 
upon the cultivation of the spirit should tend to 
diminish. But it is to just this type of youth, 
the men of intellectual ambitions and mental 
powers, the men who are conscious of a growing 
and a capacious intelligence, that I should like 
to address the final paragraphs of this chapter. 
It is precisely those men who are chiefly interested 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

in scientific and intellectual pursuits' who are 
the last men in the world who can afford to 
neglect the assiduous cultivation of the spiritual 
life. For pure learning sometimes degenerates 
into pedantry. The scholar is always in danger 
of becoming the scholastic. Much learning often 
dehumanizes men. They sink to a narrow in- 
tensity of vision within their own department. 
Their specialty is just before their eyes, its little 
province obscuring the great kingdoms of the 
world. With the measuring-rod of their de- 
tached learning they mistakenly gauge the uni- 
verse; their's is a text-book philosophy. They 
become provincials, left behind in some side 
eddy by the great stream of human life, un- 
able any longer to enter into and sympathize 
with its normal and essential experiences. All 
the bitter flings at scholarship, in which every 
age has delighted, all the semi-contemptuous 
references to the teacher and the professor, which 
practical men of every time have made, are 
partly due to this fact, that scholarship has too 
often carried the scholar out of that area of vital 
and elemental experience, where most men live 
their lives, and where the indispensable things 
of life are to be found. 

The scholar, then, of all men in the world, 
needs concrete interests. He needs, for his own 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

even development, for sweetness and sanity of 
personality, to keep in close touch with the 
warm, throbbing heart of human life. In no 
way can he do this so certainly as by maintaining 
his religious passion and cultivating his spiritual 
experience. It is the office of religion to en- 
large the humanity of its rotaries. Men never 
get so close to one another as when they pray 
together. They never so truly understand one 
other as when they worship side by side the 
God who hath made of one blood all the na- 
tions of the earth and who is no respecter 
of persons. There is no fellowship the world 
has knowledge of so potent and so intimate 
as that which knits together the elect in one 
communion and fellowship in the life of the 
Eternal Spirit. How many men might have 
their influence and their happiness increased 
a hundred fold were their humanity equal to 
their learning, and able thus always to vitalize 
it and make it effective! But no man who 
maintains a sincere and simple faith needs to 
fear the desiccating results of long-continued 
and laborious research. For the true religionist 
is a supreme humanist. 

Finally, I would remind you, who deprecate 
the alliance between learning and religion, that 
the last half of the nineteenth century made it 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

terribly clear that the learning and science of 
mankind, where they are divorced from piety, 
unconsecrated by a spiritual passion, and largely 
directed by selfish motives, can neither benefit 
nor redeem the race. Consider for a moment 
the enormous expansion of knowledge which the 
world has witnessed since the year 1859. What 
prodigious accessions to the sum of our common 
understanding have we seen in the natural and 
the humane sciences; and what marvelous uses 
of scientific knowledge for practical purposes 
have we discovered ! We have mastered in these 
latter days a thousand secrets of nature. We 
have freed the mind from old ignorance and 
ancient superstition. We have penetrated the 
secrets of the body, and can almost conquer 
death and indefinitely prolong the span of human 
days. We face the facts and know the world as 
our fathers could never do. We understand the 
past and foresee the future. But the most sig- 
nificant thing about our present situation is this : 
how little has this wisdom, in and of itself, done 
for us! It has made men more cunning, rather 
than more noble. Still the body is ravaged and 
consumed by passion. Still men toil for others 
against their will, and "The strong spill the 
blood of the weak for their ambition, and the 
sweat of the children for their greed." Never 

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RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP 

was learning so diffused, nor the content of 
scholarship so large as now. Yet the great 
cities are as Babylon and Rome of old, where 
human wreckage multiplies, and hideous vices 
flourish, and men toil without expectancy, and 
live without hope, and millions exist from hand 
to mouth. As we survey the universal unrest 
of the world to-day, and see the horrors of war 
between nation and nation and between class 
and class, it would not be difficult to make out 
a case for the thesis that the scientific and in- 
tellectual advances of the nineteenth century 
have largely worked to make men keener and 
more capacious in their suffering. And, at least 
this is true; in just so far as the achievement of 
the mind has been divorced from the consecra- 
tion of the spirit, in just so far knowledge has 
had no beneficent potency for the human race. 

The twentieth century needs, in order to make 
life tolerable, just what the first century needed 
— the sacrifice of love, the devotion of the spirit, 
the humbling of the soul before its God. Intel- 
lectual training enriches and illumines human 
lives when accompanied by the light and peace 
of a veritable moral victory. But without that 
victory, it can make men into devils. Scholar- 
ship is precious and sublime when it is directed 
to precious and ideal ends. Learning is not 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

of much use if the learning is greater than the 
man who thinks that he possesses it. We ought 
to be thankful that in our American colleges, 
across the campus from the library, stands the 
college church; and that under its roof, morning 
by morning and Sunday by Sunday, we have to 
assemble for meditation and quiet and com- 
munion. For it is by just such natural and 
venerable practices of the spirit, by such corpor- 
ate confessions of the inner life, that the con- 
secration of personality keeps pace with the 
enlargement of mentality, and the man grows 
with his learning. 



CHAPTER VII 

IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

In the "Hibbert Journal" of October, 1914, there 
was a delightful article by Professor Erskine, of 
Columbia University, on the provocative theme: 
"The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent." In 
this article he pointed out that the disposition to 
consider intelligence a positive peril, and to 
make an antithesis between brains and virtue, is 
an ancient custom of our English race. He 
reminds us that, in our literature, most men of 
brains have been conceived of as villians, as, for 
instance, Iago and Macbeth in Shakespeare and 
Satan in Milton's "Paradise Lost"; and that 
most men of honor, while they may have been 
thought of as knowing good and evil, have been 
apparently quite unable to tell them apart. And 
he quotes Kingsley's delightfully Victorian line: 
"Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever." 
It is, then, part of our inheritance that we 
should suspect brains, and even think that a 
really virile male is obligated to depreciate 
brilliancy. The Anglo-Saxon temperament has 
always exalted doing, at the expense of knowing. 
Half unconsciously we expect that neither first- 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

rate manhood nor large efficiency may be looked 
for from scholarship. This prejudice was very 
clearly revealed in the semi-contemptuous, semi- 
patronizing references to the "doctor" and the 
"professor," when our present Chief Executive 
was first nominated for the Presidency.* 

We ought not, then, to be over-surprised or 
too harshly critical if we find the undergraduate 
incapable, both by inheritance and environment, 
of justly appreciating intellectual discipline. 
And amazing though it sounds, and is, there are, 
as a matter of fact, few places in the Anglo- 
Saxon world where this naive dislike of learning, 
this provincial distrust of intelligence, more 
clearly displays itself than in the American 
college. 

It is one of the many humorous elements in 
our undergraduate life that the question which 
forms the theme of this chapter, "Is Learning 
Essential?" can be asked in all good faith, and 
may be quite seriously debated. It is certain 
that many of the students in our colleges quite 
frankly and innocently regard scholarship as 
purely incidental to an undergraduate career. 
When we remember that our New England in- 
stitutions were founded to produce scholars in 
general and a learned ministry in particular; 

*Dr. Thomas Woodrow Wilson. 
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IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

that, indeed, a lad is still supposed to go to school 
primarily to get schooling, it really gives us 
pause to contemplate the low average of intelli- 
gence and the limited intellectual power of the 
typical undergraduate. This may seem to be a 
harsh indictment; but the trouble is not that it 
is harsh, but that it is true. A scholar is a 
disciple of learning; one who has begun to love 
knowledge for its own gracious and liberating 
sake, and who has acquired enough of it in his 
four academic years to begin to be a cultivated 
man. But am I wrong in saying that there are 
not many undergraduates who answer to that 
definition? There are certainly some men in 
every college class who already love learning for 
its own sake, and their number is steadily in- 
creasing. It might be well for the boy who will 
not seriously work his mind in college, and who 
feels that he ought not to be expected or com- 
pelled to do so, to realize, now, that his days are 
numbered. As I look back over the fourteen 
years which have elapsed since my own graduat- 
ing from Harvard, the two changes most notice- 
able in the college during that time are the 
growth of a new corporate consciousness in 
undergraduate life, and the increasing intellectual 
seriousness, coincident with the stiffening of the 
college course. Formerly, if a man attended 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

his lectures with decent regularity, and did some 
hard work in the weeks preceding his midyear 
and final examinations, he might spend the 
better part of his year in elegant leisure, and 
still make his degree, even make it with dis- 
tinction. But now, by means of the frequent 
conferences and quizzes set in the elementary 
courses, and the large number of theses required 
in more advanced work, this is no longer true. 
The minimum of intellectual labor which a 
student must perform to maintain his under- 
graduate standing is much larger than it used 
to be, and it is steadily increasing. 

There are, then, not a few men who have 
deliberately left philistinism, and are beginning 
to live in the realms of sweetness and light; 
but most undergraduates don't know what 
"philistinism" means! And, from the point of 
view of genuine scholarship, the student body 
separates into two groups. In the first group, 
which does not, I think, comprise half the college, 
are men who do considerable serious intellectual 
work, but who do it from such mistaken motives, 
or for such inadequate ends, that they cannot be 
dignified by the gentle name of "scholar." 
These men are either "grinds" or "commer- 
cialists." By "grinds" I mean men who value 
information rather than the human insights, the 

178 



IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

ideal values, the enlarged view of truth, which 
may be gained through information, or who value 
it because of the academic standing, the personal 
position which it gives to them. They make no 
distinction between knowledge and wisdom, and 
would consider an immature erudition a sufficient 
substitute for developed personality. They be- 
come a sort of walking encyclopedia, an irritating 
and unhuman compendium of ill-assorted and 
unrelated information. They are not springs, 
but sponges; the depositories, rather than the 
sources, of ideas. They are full of other people's 
thoughts, but they are hardly thinkers. They 
cultivate no wide human contacts and have no 
clear and intelligent idea of life as a whole, 
neither perceiving the end which they should 
have in view nor the just means whereby to 
reach it. The grind has certain admirable 
qualities, intellectual conscience, mental energy, 
perseverance, and ambition of a sort. But, for 
all that, the grind is not a scholar. 

The other men in this first group are the com- 
mercialists. They are possessed of a sound 
"business sense" — oh, glorious and glorified 
phrase! — which means, in simple and sincere 
English, the sense of the value of money. They 
have been sent to college because they and their 
parents think that, on the whole, it offers them 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

a good business preparation, which means that it 
will instruct them in the gentle art of making 
money. Hence these men work very well in 
certain undergraduate departments, not because 
they are interested in intellectual ideals, but 
because, to put it very crudely, they feel sure 
that it pays. They would choose, during their 
four years, therefore, those courses whose im- 
mediate utility they can perceive. They want 
the sort of learning which may be readily cashed. 
Hence, all disciplines of indirect value are dep- 
recated. The so-called cultural courses are 
not popular. The classics and literature seem 
futile. Now, these men, too, have certain ad- 
mirable qualities; energy, ambition, and self- 
reliance, and, while they are essentially alien 
figures in the college of liberal arts, they are much 
more sinned against than sinning. For they 
are the direct products of our American life, 
with its practical ingenuity, its mechanical 
interests, its opulent materialism. Like the 
grinds, however, these men, though often good 
students, are not scholars. For they do not 
love learning for its own sake, nor perceive the 
large and natural ends which it serves. They 
have not seen the vision which learning and 
religion alike induce, that the real values of 
life are intangible and invisible, that the precious 

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IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

ends of human effort are spiritual. They 
have neither this gracious spirit nor this philo- 
sophic sense. Having means more to them than 
being. 

Thus we dispose of our first group, and ap- 
proach the second, and immediately we yet 
further descend. For some of the men in this 
second group are merely "sports." Probably 
you know what the " sport "is. He is the elegant 
mendicant, the academic beggar, the hanger-on 
to the fringes of undergraduate life. He corre- 
sponds, in our world, to that well-known figure in 
rural districts, whose chief function in life is to 
lounge about the railway station, meditatively 
turning a wisp of hay between his teeth, watching 
the trains go by. He is apt to wear somewhat 
exaggerated clothes and to have a somewhat 
exaggerated manner. He represents inconse- 
quent irresponsibility, raised to the nth power. 
President Jordan compares him to that other 
group of men found in metropolitan centers who 
chiefly support the city's lamp-posts while their 
women work at the washtub or run the sewing- 
machine. He points out that, like them, the 
sport has no sense of responsibility to his com- 
munity and no large self-respect, but looks upon 
time, the one incalculably precious possession of 
the human being, as something to be got rid of; 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

and means to dispose of it without giving any 
return for it. 

Now, not all of us are sports. For, while all of 
us are lazy, laziness being an almost invariable 
accompaniment of rapidly growing youth, most 
of us have genuine and respectable interests, 
upon which we expend a great deal of thought, 
will, and energy. The difficulty with most boys 
is not in getting them to work at what they like, 
but in persuading them to like that at which they 
ought to work. And the trouble is that most of 
us do not expend our time and selves, in the four 
incomparable years, upon the things for which 
those years are intended and from which we 
should derive our largest advantage. Our chief 
interests are physical; the intellectual feebleness 
of the college is clearest shown in the grotesque 
exaggeration of athletic interests. This is both 
a cause and effect of the low average of under- 
graduate intelligence, but chiefly, I think, a 
cause. I am aware that, like King Agag before 
Samuel, I must walk delicately, if I am to 
approach the subject of athletics when writing 
for undergraduates. But it is impossible to 
ignore it, for the amount of time and effort 
which athletics absorb in the modern college is 
out of all proportion to the benefits which are 
gained from them. And, it is nothing short of 

182 



IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

degenerative to have a man win first-rate stand- 
ing in the academic community on grounds and 
achievements other than those for which such a 
community primarily stands. It has almost come 
to the pass, to-day, that the method of judging 
our instructors, or any older person's mental or 
spiritual ability, is to find out what impression 
they may have made upon the young Hercules 
of the college, or whether, in their own youth, 
they were able to do the high jump or to put the 
shot. At a leading university of the Middle 
West, last winter, I heard an announcement given 
by one of the deans of the institution to the 
undergraduate audience which a few moments 
afterward I was to address. The dean was 
announcing that a young and able missionary 
leader was to speak at the university during 
Holy Week, and he desired to commend him to 
a large and favorable hearing. What was his 
method of presenting him to the audience? He 
informed them that at a recent series of meetings, 
held by the speaker in question in an Eastern 
college, every member of the football team had 
been won over! Well, what more could one ask? 
What better method is there to use, in a great 
university, when commending a teacher and a 
scholar, than to say that the members of the 
Eleven have assured his success, by graciously 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

signifying, concerning him, their sovereign appro- 
val? Again, the general absorption in athletics 
is detrimental to the genuine intellectual interests 
of the college, not so much through the athletes 
themselves, for they do get a vigorous discipline 
in things moral and physical, but through the 
mass of undergraduate onlookers, who take out 
their athletics chiefly by sitting on the bleachers 
during the contest and by wasting time discuss- 
ing the game afterward. All young men appear 
to be natural gossips, and to enjoy inconsequent 
small talk and the bandying about of every sort 
of undergraduate rumor. But the amount of 
time that groups of men will spend going over 
and over, with wearisome iteration, every detail 
of recent athletic contests, would really be in- 
credible to any one who had not observed it for 
himself. Quite recently I traveled by chance for 
some four hours in a Pullman car with a group of 
young men, most of whom I knew, who were 
returning on the day before graduation to their 
own college from another institution, where they 
had either been spectators or participants in a 
baseball game. They spent the entire afternoon, 
while on the train, in no other occupation except 
that of calculating batting averages and rehears- 
ing the separate plays of their classmates of the 
day before. Not much can be said in defense 

184 



IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

of this vicarious athletic activity. Certainly, it 
should always come second in a normal under- 
graduate career, as a part of the relaxation from 
real intellectual pursuits. But, as a matter of 
fact, it often comes first, and studies must get 
what they can of the time and energy which are 
left. Hence so many men crowd into the easier 
courses; hence it is fashionable to depreciate 
learning, and not good form to be a cultivated 
person. There is, of course, a very vivid and 
spectacular side to these athletic interests, and 
it is not hard to understand why they dominate 
undergraduate imagination. There is, for in- 
stance, a new figure who has appeared in the 
college world since my day, — the cheer leader; 
and even as the rabbit is charmed by the eye 
of the snake, so do we older men regard him, 
fascinated, and with awe. He is a delirious 
person, curveting and capering up and down the 
side lines like any faun, his nimble feet spurning 
the ground. With sublime self-abnegation he 
turns his back upon the heroes of the gridiron. 
Wrath and zeal are shining in his eyes, exhorting 
passion quivers on his lips, while his wildly 
waving arms implore, demand, create the vocal 
thunders that sweep along the serried ranks of the 
bleachers, from the throats of his admiring peers ! 
Who would not go to any college, and submit to 

185 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

almost any intellectual discipline, if he might 
attain to such a power? What is a Phi Beta 
Kappa Key beside it? But when the tumult and 
the shouting die, the solemn pity of it all remains, 
that many a youth comes of age and is graduated 
from college with a man's body and a boy's mind. 
Hence it is true that most of us are frankly 
illiterate, and we are graduated illiterate. I 
don't mean by that that we are unable to read or 
write, or to express ourselves after a rough-and- 
ready fashion. I mean that most of us, as 
scholars, are arrant failures, because we are 
ignorant of good literature, and incapable of 
conveying our thoughts with elegance or lucidity 
or precision. A letter from an undergraduate 
in a leading Eastern university, written last 
winter, illustrates the point. He was writing 
home on a Sunday afternoon, and referring to 
the sermon preached that morning before the 
university, by perhaps the most distinguished 
public speaker now residing in New York City. 
The boy's appreciation of this really notable 
man was a masterpiece of discriminating insight 
and felicitous expression. He wrote: "We had 
a guy down here this morning from New York, 
who preached forty minutes. Gee, he was 
rotten!" Now, this is the language one might 
expect from the East-Side gamin. It represents 

186 



IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

gross illiteracy in an undergraduate. Much of 
the profanity which is very common among 
students, many, also, of the more extreme forms 
of slang which enliven their conversations, may 
be traced to the same cause. They are not due 
so much to viciousness or native vulgarity as to 
undeveloped intelligence. The student is unable 
to express himself clearly and simply, and there- 
fore falls back on ancient expletives and vivid 
emotional symbols. The chief impression which 
a conversation with a typical undergraduate 
leaves on the listener is of the inchoate condition 
of the boy's mind. This inability to express 
himself is, in a great measure, due to his igno- 
rance of English, to say nothing of European, 
letters. Dean West has pointed out that the 
majority of college students are not familiar with 
the commonplaces of literary information; with 
the standard books of history, fiction, and verse. 
How much do they even know of that greatest 
of all books in our English tongue, which records 
the high- water mark of our spoken language — 
the King James Version of the Bible? I once 
asked a boy in my Freshman Bible class, "Who 
was Hagar?" and he gently replied, "One of the 
twelve Apostles." And so that incomparable 
record of human experience, and masterpiece of 
sober, yet warm and vivid English, together with 

187 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

all the treasure of thought and emotion which our 
larger literature comprehends, all, is essentially 
unknown. 

This is surely one reason why there appears to 
be an increasing impoverishment of personality 
in the undergraduate body. Individualities are 
not developed; there are fewer notable and 
outstanding figures. I think it is chiefly due to 
the illiteracy. Some of us do, indeed, acquire 
considerable information in college, but not the 
grace and sensitiveness, the breadth and insight 
which should issue from it. No man can be 
called a scholar, or be said to have succeeded as 
an undergraduate, or to have utilized his most 
precious opportunities, who has failed to gain 
something of that spiritual breeding, that quick 
and varied appreciation, that adaptability to 
men and surroundings, that sane and tolerant 
knowledge of human life which only wide ac- 
quaintance with letters can bring to youth. 
But we read, instead of literature, the sporting 
page of the newspaper, the ten-cent magazines, 
the current and ephemeral fiction. Do we 
expect that learning and culture are to be found 
between the pages of the short story in "Mun- 
sey's" and "McClure's"? Are we supposed, in 
college, to study the humanities and read the 
classics, to acquaint ourselves with books on 

188 



IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

philosophy and science, only to that limited 
extent which will enable us to gain pass-marks 
in a certain number of courses, and to issue 
respectably from our Alma Mater? When one 
considers the variety of intellectual interests 
thrust upon us all to-day, the paucity and 
poverty of intellectual life in college, the intel- 
lectual frugality of undergraduate conversation, 
is appalling. There is little intelligent discussion 
of significant contemporary themes, whether in 
politics or economics or ethics. The under- 
graduates of to-day know some facts, but they 
have few ideas. They can talk quite glibly on 
things, but are confused in the realm of prin- 
ciples, and are notably unable to trace effects 
to their just causes. The childish and bizarre 
motives which the average undergraduate will 
assign to his parents, his minister, his president 
and his faculty, for their deeds, betray an utter 
absence in him of just observation or the power 
to make rational deductions. 

This, then, is what I mean by illiteracy. And 
it is not only a severe but it is a humiliating 
indictment to bring against the modern collegian. 
And yet, is the picture which it presents so very 
different from the actual undergraduate life as 
you yourselves live it? What is the goal of your 
college days? Is n't it to be active and cheerful 

189 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

and energetic, and to have a good time? Is n't 
it to avoid any long-continued intellectual re- 
sponsibility, and not to think too seriously (lest 
you be a highbrow!), and say you are never 
young but once, and enjoy yourself? Is n't it 
to gain in college a smattering of knowledge upon 
a number of secondary subjects, to dip into the 
clever and popular publications of the moment, 
to use, with complacent facility, the particular 
patter of your group or class? Is n't it to wear, 
with scrupulous exactness, the precise garment 
which fashion demands and which your tailors 
will trust you with, to cheer with superb noise 
at the games, and to be adept in sitting on 
bleachers? Is n't it, in vacation time, to see the 
actor and hear the singer of the moment, and to 
know the names, or yet better the persons, of 
famous — or infamous — people? That is an 
exaggerated picture, but it is just true enough to 
be justifiable. It is this absence of intellectual 
vigor, this commonplaceness of mental life, this 
lack of personal distinction, which is a serious 
indictment of the college. In the realm of the 
intellect it is the easy rather than the hard 
things, the pleasant rather than the best things, 
that we desire. There is a story current at 
Harvard, told of the days when the elective 
system was in full swing. I do not know whether 

190 



IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

it be true, but it certainly illustrates the truth of 
the extent to which the student will carry this 
intellectual living along the lines of least re- 
sistance — unless the authorities prevent him. 
A student presented to the dean for his approval 
a schedule of unrelated and widely scattered 
courses. The dean inquired what had been the 
principle of choice in making up the extraordinary 
selection. The young scholar answered, "Well, 
there is n't any course here which comes before 
ten o'clock in the morning, or is up more than 
one flight of stairs." Such a man, it may be said 
in passing, offers the best of arguments for a 
return to a semi-prescribed curriculum. 

Now, one would expect that such a situation, 
being so obviously a perversion, would attract 
critical and solicitous attention. The American 
college represents a prodigious material invest- 
ment. The amount of capital tied up in educa- 
tion in this country is unprecedented. When we 
contemplate the widespread and practical in- 
terest in schools and universities which the 
country manifests, and when we see on com- 
mencement day what is the result of it all, we 
might expect that somebody would be putting 
the college of liberal arts on trial and demanding 
that it justify its existence. Nor is that expec- 
tation unwarranted. That is precisely what the 

191 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

American public is now beginning to do. I am 
sure the undergraduate body to-day utterly fails 
to realize the significance and the volume of 
criticism which is now being directed against 
the college. I shall have amply succeeded in 
this chapter if I can assure you of one thing, and 
make you feel its ensuing responsibility. Your 
college, to-day, is under fire; it is being asked to 
show better reasons than it can now show for 
the time and money and human genius which are 
devoted to it. Professor Lockwood, in his recent 
compilation of addresses, called "The Freshman 
and his College," quotes men of standing and 
ability and wide knowledge of the world, who 
variously allude to the college as "a club of idling 
classes; a training-school for shamming and 
shirking; the most gigantic illusion of the age." 
These men believe that a college diploma rarely 
assures intellectual discipline. The editor of a 
New York daily affirms that students now get 
from the college life "little but educational dis- 
advantages." In an article on "What is Wrong 
with the College," appearing in the "Century" 
for May, 1914, occurs the following paragraph: — 
" The Incubus of the Idle Student. Looked 
at in this light, we see how specious are the 
arguments which have led us to tolerate the 
college idler so long. Clinging to the remote 

192 



IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

hope of his regeneration, we have permitted him 
to contaminate hundreds with the virus of in- 
tellectual listlessness. The time for tolerance is 
past. War measures are now necessary. The 
first and crying need of the American college 
to-day is the ejection, the ruthless ejection, of 
the man with the idle mind. He is the leper of 
college society." 

Oxford University looks somewhat askance at 
the Rhodes scholars, and finds American youth 
brilliant, but devoid of intellectual persistency 
and without those broad scholastic foundations 
which are absolutely essential to first-rate ad- 
vanced work. International experts in education 
tell us that our graduates are not as ripe and 
fit for professional study at twenty-three as 
German students are at the age of twenty. 
Business men complain that the college grad- 
uate is neither a trained nor a serious worker. 
Mr. Abraham Flexner, in his bitterly resented 
but brilliant book on the "American College" 
says: "A youth may win his degree to-day on 
a showing that would in an office cost him 
his desk." 

President Pritchett, of the Carnegie Founda- 
tion for the Advancement of Teaching, who is a 
very potent figure in the academic world of our 
time, says: "The two objections generally 

193 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

brought against the college to-day are vagueness 
of aim and lack of intellectual stamina." When 
it was announced that Mr. Lowell had accepted 
the presidency of Harvard University, the 
undergraduates gathered, one evening before his 
house, and, in responding to their greeting, he 
made an impromptu speech. In that informal 
talk he said certain things. which quite clearly 
indicated his determination to reinstate scholar- 
ship as a primary aim in at least one American 
college. He said: "You are come here to be 
educated. The educated youth is n't merely he 
who can answer questions. He is the man who 
knows what are the questions that need to be 
answered." And he said another thing that will 
not easily be forgotten: "During my administra- 
tion, the head of the college will not be caring 
about what you want, but about what you 
think." In this connection it may not be 
inappropriate to quote the story told of the 
undergraduate who attended one of Mr. Lowell's 
Sunday afternoon receptions. As he was leaving, 
the President very kindly said, "How do you 
find your work going?" The boy answered 
nonchalantly, "Oh, I think very well, sir. I 
guess I am getting gentleman's grades." "Ah," 
said Mr. Lowell, looking at him, "then you 
must be getting either A's or E's. A gentleman 

194 



IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

either does his very best or he does n't pretend 
to do anything." 

If, therefore, you ask the question, "Is scholar- 
ship a prime essential in the college?" I should 
answer very soberly and sincerely that I believe 
the continued existence of the college of liberal 
arts in New England depends upon a marked 
improvement in undergraduate learning. For 
four years you are non-producers there. The 
state and nation subsidize your institution, de- 
manding no taxes from it, and the community 
supports you. It is not done to give you four 
more long vacations. It is not done in order to 
make you an expert in either social or athletic 
activities. It is not done that you may have a 
winter watering-place which is just touched with 
an academic flavor. It is done because the na- 
tion needs the services of a trained intelligence 
and a mature mind, and is willing to support 
you for a while for the express purpose that 
you may gain these things and . issue from the 
college mental and moral leaders in your com- 
munity. Expert service, to be rendered on the 
basis of the training of these four years, is the 
only justification of any of our colleges. 

This Republic is facing social and industrial 
problems, economic, moral and religious ques- 
tions, which are graver and more pressing than 

195 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

any which it has ever faced before in its history. 
It is, as some one has said, being plundered by 
the rich and robbed by the poor, while the trusts 
and unions play the tyrant over both. The 
nation looks to its young, educated men to lead 
it out of the wilderness. It looks to you to be 
prime factors in the creation of what is our 
greatest social need to-day — a sober and re- 
sponsible public opinion. The very stress of 
present circumstances is making America de- 
mand that a college man shall be what he purports 
to be — a person of trained intelligence and some 
expert knowledge, who is able to bring to bear, 
at any time, on any given problem, the concen- 
trated and continued power of a well-furnished 
and disciplined mind. Again, the handwriting 
is appearing, over against the candlestick on 
the wall of the king's palace. And two things 
are being asked of the Chaldeans, the learned 
men of the community: first, that they read the 
writing, and then, having read it, that they be 
able to give the interpretation thereof. 

Do not suppose, then, that loyalty to your 
institution means singing and shouting and 
cheering, or the perpetuation of picturesque 
barbarities, themselves only an expression of 
communal undergraduate life when it had no 
normal outlet for physical energy in organized 

196 



-\ 



IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

athletics. The state, the nation, the fathers and 
mothers of the boys who are to come here after 
you, care next to nothing for all that. They are 
concerned with graver, more real and difficult 
things. What they want to know is, does the 
college teach you how to think straight? Can 
it give you a rewarding method of work? Do 
you learn mental concentration there? Are you 
to graduate with a diploma that signifies evident 
and available intellectual power? If you cannot 
answer these questions in the affirmative, then 
you are, in sober truth, among your Alma Mater 9 s 
most disloyal sons. 

You owe it, then, to your college, as the most 
necessary element of your loyalty to her, that 
you address yourself to acquiring that knowledge 
of the arts and sciences which shall make you 
a well-informed and clearly thinking being. 
You owe it no less, to yourself and to the nation, 
to accept the austere delights and the fine satis- 
factions of the disciplined mind and cultivated 
spirit. Your undergraduate years offer you 
the priceless opportunity to relinquish obvious, 
immediate, and practical endeavors, and to 
acquaint yourselves with those great realms of 
thought and feeling which have nothing directly 
to do with the material and money-getting exist- 
ence, but have everything to do with the em- 

197 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

powering and liberating of your own spirit, since 
they reveal to you the mind and the heart of man 
at their best estate. One is constrained to plead 
with you to devote yourselves again to the 
humanities before, sent out from the sheltering 
academic walls, you essay the delicate and diffi- 
cult business of living as a producer and a friend, 
a husband and a father, among your fellow 
human beings. The college does not exist to 
teach you a business or a trade, but to show you 
how to apply correctly whatever business you 
take up, and most of all, how to succeed in the 
business of living. You should, therefore, be 
steeped in the great literatures which are the 
record of the noblest emotion, the clearest 
thinking, of [the race. You should read your 
iEschylus and Euripides and Sophocles — those 
men, whose somber and monumental dramas 
reveal the turbid ebb and flow in men's miserable 
hearts. You should be at home in the great 
revival of arts and letters of the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries, and should know your Pe- 
trarch and Dante, your Boccaccio and Tasso and 
Vasari. You should know the great biographies 
and autobiographies of Europe, and stories like 
"Gil Bias." Most of all, you should read the 
Elizabethan dramatists, acquainting yourself 
with those frank and vigorous pictures of human 

198 



IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

life, set forth in all the lusty ease of their fine 
English. "Tom Jones" should lie upon your 
study desk, as it lay upon Lowell's, because, as 
Thackeray said, "No one since Fielding has dared 
to draw a man as he is." And you ought to read 
Balzac, Hugo, and Dumas, because theirs is the 
literature which is impacted with the very blood 
and bone of human experience, and brings you 
close to the heart of a man. It is out of this wide 
and deep interest in the gracious and the beauti- 
ful, the vivid and the picturesque in life, that 
men grow to appreciate all sorts and kinds of 
their fellow men. This will stimulate the imagi- 
nation, will keep you from mental commonplace- 
ness, make articulate your spirit, free you from 
the narrow range of interests and sympathies 
which is the lot of uneducated men. Thus 
will you put yourself in sympathy with the time 
spirit and with those frail contemporary lives 
that are borne along its current. Thus will 
your thought spring forth on high levels, inter- 
preting, not condemning, guiding, not repressing, 
assuaging, not exploiting, the multiform desires 
of men. 

Here is some faint picture of the sort of 
gracious intellectual interests which you would 
naturally have were you scholarly inclined, which 
you must have if you are to do your duty by 

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THE COLLEGE COURSE 

yourself, your college, and your nation. It may 
seem to you that I have been unfair to the under- 
graduate in these pages, and that the picture I 
have drawn of your activities is less a portrait 
than a caricature. But it is a good thing for you 
to perceive just how those activities may appear 
when they are regarded from the point of view of 
that older and more responsible portion of the 
community upon which both you and your in- 
stitution depend. I am not advocating turning 
the college into a community of immature 
scholastics, nor abolishing its social activities or 
its vigorous physical delights. I believe in these 
things profoundly, and myself enjoy them im- 
mensely. They have a natural and important 
place in your lives, and in all normal lives. I am 
only appealing for a just scale of values, asking 
you to put first things first, and casting no 
reproach upon pleasure nor depreciating in the 
slightest degree all the joy that can be crowded 
into a human life. All of it which justly comes 
your way will be none too much. Only the 
pleasures which are adequate and worthy for you, 
the elect youth of the Republic, are not the idle 
but the achieved pleasures; not the easy but 
the difficult joys; those deep and abiding satisfac- 
tions which come from intellectual self-mastery, 
from winning the battles of the mind. What 
200 



IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

you should enjoy most is victory in the fight 
against intellectual sloth, mental trivialities, easy- 
going indulgence. 

Therefore, one ventures to plead with you to 
be ashamed of illiteracy and ambitious to exercise 
your minds and to know the truth. Therefore, 
one ventures to remind you that the permanent 
and central aim of college life can be nothing less 
precious or difficult than the acquirement of in- 
tellectual capacity. This is n't the poor ability 
of the grind to perform a particular mechanical 
thing in a prescribed, particular way. It's the 
power of focusing on any intellectual problem the 
full force of a trained intelligence. And it is pre- 
cisely this power which the courses which are 
taught in a college of liberal arts can and do 
develop. I have no doubt much of your work 
there seems to you remote and impractical; that 
it seems like a wasting of time to put energy and 
person into the acquiring of knowledge, the learn- 
ing of formulae, which you never expect to use 
directly when you go out into, let us say, the 
business world. Yet it is just here that the un- 
dergraduate makes his mistake. All these disci- 
plinary and cultural studies of the classical course 
are vastly more practical than we are willing to 
admit. The study of the binomial theorem is 
visibly and directly of no use in brokerage or 

201 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

banking. Yet, as Professor Leacock, of McGill 
University, has pointed out, "One who has mas- 
tered it will find it easier to appear promptly at 
nine o'clock in the morning, to attend to what is 
said to him, to understand his own ignorance and 
do his best to remove it, than one who has never 
seen the inside of an algebra." Most boys feel 
it unnecessary, to-day, to gain or maintain a 
thorough acquaintance with the Greek and Latin 
tongues, nor can they see how such acquirement 
is related to our modern world. Yet the mastery 
of these languages bears directly upon four of the 
great professions, all of which are attracting an 
increasing number of men, to-day, into their ranks 
— those of the ministry, of law, of journalism, and 
of politics. In all these fields, men must be able 
to express themselves before their fellow men with 
accuracy, force, and ease. They must be able, 
not only to think on their feet, but to transmit 
their thoughts with precision and effectiveness. 
Therefore, to them the knowledge of the great 
tongues from which our English language springs, 
the mastery of the Greek and Latin derivatives of 
our common speech, which enables them to dis- 
tinguish subtle differences between words, that 
are apparent synonyms, and to arouse the 
imagination of their hearers by using words with 
the sense of their background, their associations, 

202' 



IS LEARNING ESSENTIAL? 

and connotations, is of prime importance. Truly 
the immediate future will need what all the past 
has needed — philosophers and statesmen, and 
its own literature, and a culture able to enrich 
and ennoble life as well as to serve its conven- 
iences. Therefore, for the serious student and for 
his generation the college can do so much more 
and better than the mere fitting him for a special 
career if it prescribes those studies which offer 
a comprehensive view of the knowledge which 
is to be most serviceable to the whole of his after 
life, which is to insure the real development of 
the man and the true freedom of the human 
spirit. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

We are come, to my regret, to the last of our 
friendly and informal talks on undergraduate 
problems. But I am rejoicing, in the fascinating 
if elusive theme which is to occupy us in it, 
namely, the aesthetic problem of the college. 
Well I know that vague feelings of discomfort 
arise in the undergraduate breast when such a 
topic is announced. It represents rather a 
strange and alien subject for you, removed from 
the everyday area of undergraduate experience. 
Yet I think it has a place in the discussion of 
college problems, for it must not be forgotten 
that in our country you are to be called upon to 
set standards as well as to transmit ideas for 
your generation. 

And this office of yours is the more important, 
because, as perhaps not all of us realize, a distinct 
decline in taste has been one of the features of 
the history of New England during the pre- 
ceding century. Even as the Greeks who 
belonged to the flower of Attic civilization, the 
Athenians of the days of Phidias and Pericles, 
should they be able to visit an American city, 
204 



THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

would be appalled beyond measure at the hideous 
noise, the garish lights, the oddly contrasted 
colors, which make up the crude and inchoate 
expressions of our communal life, and would con- 
sider our civilization merely a complicated bar- 
barism, so, I fancy, our colonial forbears, if they 
could return at this moment, would find that 
their descendants had indeed progressed in 
economic wealth and material comforts, but that 
they had quite retrogressed in matters of appre- 
ciation and taste. We fail to remember that the 
early settlements along the Atlantic seacoast, 
primitive as they were and embosomed in a 
savage wilderness, nevertheless perpetuated many 
of the aristocratic traditions and standards of 
that incomparable English life from which they 
were derived. This was strikingly evidenced in 
their architecture, that colonial modification of 
the Georgian type which the new building 
material, wood, and the new climatic and social 
conditions of the settlements brought about. 
In few places are there to be found better com- 
posed, more stately buildings than, let us say, 
Griffin Hall, at Williams College, with its deli- 
cately penciled front, or the ancient colonial 
State House fronting State Street in Boston, a 
building which, with the simplest material and 
the fewest lines, achieves an extraordinary effect 

205 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

of daintiness and grace. Nowhere is there a 
church-tower more light and airy and upward- 
reaching than the belfry, surmounted by its 
double-storied lantern and spire, which presides, 
at Park Street corner, over Boston Common. 
And nowhere are there domestic dwellings which 
give more happily the impression of stateliness 
and hospitality, of dignity and simplicity, than 
do such mansions as the Craigie house in Cam- 
bridge, or the presidents' houses at Amherst and 
Williams Colleges. These latter, indeed, are ex- 
pressions of post-colonial life, but derive their 
beauty from colonial influence and tradition. 
In the manual and decorative arts, as well, the 
early days of the American colonies saw truly 
notable achievements. The colonial reproduc- 
tions of the Chippendale, Adam, Sheraton, and 
Heppelwhite models of furniture, the delicately 
carved woodwork wherewith the colonial houses 
were adorned, the Sheffield plate, the engraved 
silver, the festooned and rose-sprigged china of 
the period — all these mark expressions of the 
decorative impulse which in their elegant simplic- 
ity it would be hard to excel in any time or place. 
Moreover, the manners and conversation of the 
time also had their touch of an Old-World 
formality and stateliness which is quaintly pre- 
served for us in the epistolatory writings of the 
206 



THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

day. The president of at least one ancient 
institution of learning in New England, in signing 
the official documents of his university, still 
retains the formal and gracious superscription 
of our early forbears, and inscribes himself, 
"Your most obedient and humble servant." 

I think it to be true, therefore, that the colonial 
college, which was part and parcel of the life of 
the time, for all its primitive equipment, and 
the high-school character of its teaching, was a 
much more cultivated and sophisticated insti- 
tution than we are apt to consider it, and the 
level of taste among undergraduates was con- 
siderably higher than we are wont to suppose. 
For the colonial colleges were not the first 
hesitant reachings-out after a cultivated life by 
a primitive community. They were the deliber- 
ate continuation on the part of English-bred men 
and women of that aristocratic tradition upon 
which the colleges across the sea were founded. 
They were established as factors in the theocratic, 
aristocratic politics of the time. Harvard and 
Yale, the pioneers of learning in New England, 
were in the beginning a sort of cross between 
a theological seminary and a training-school for 
the sons of the colonial gentry. Down to 1772 
in Harvard, and to 1763 in Yale, students' names 
appeared in the annual catalogues of these insti- 

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tutions, not in alphabetical order, but according 
to the rank of their parents in colonial society. 
First came sons of the governors of the colony; 
then of the ministers of the Gospel; then of civil 
and military authorities; then of lawyers and 
physicians; then of merchants in large trade, 
that is, sea-going merchants; then of freeholders 
or farmers; then of workers in towns. It was 
part of the business of the colleges to produce 
that combination of cultivated manner and 
manly accomplishment which made up the ideal 
of the English gentleman. Moreover, nearly all 
the undergraduates of the colonial colleges were 
not merely destined for professional careers, but 
came, either from the professional stratum of the 
community or from homes where the learned 
professions were revered and exalted in the eyes 
of the children. Hence, partly because of the 
class in the community from which the under- 
graduate body was drawn, and partly because of 
the sincere and simple taste in both inward and 
outward matters which marked these frontier 
settlements, the colleges in the early days 
represented quite as much aesthetic as ethical 
idealism. 

Now, it is hardly necessary to say that they 
have suffered since those days a sad change, and 
this is due to a variety of causes. The German 



THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

ideal of an exact knowledge, as contrasted with a 
more general cultivation, operated early in the 
last century to modify the English influence, em- 
phasizing in the literary and classic flavor of the 
college, the severer note of erudition and inten- 
sifying the discipline. This was a distinct con- 
tribution to American education, bringing in new 
elements of strength and intellectual vigor; but 
it added nothing to that cultivation of the 
imagination and correcting of the aesthetic ideals 
which was also a part of a college's duty in a new 
and heterogeneous community like ours. The 
rise first of the natural, then of the humanistic, 
sciences, in the second half of the nineteenth 
century, greatly enlarged the curriculum, and, 
in the absorption of time and attention formerly 
given to the classics, largely modified the feelings 
and the taste, as well as the schedule, of the 
undergraduate. Scientific pursuits, from the 
nature of the material with which they deal and 
of the methods which they employ, cannot 
produce as fine and discriminating appreciations 
of beauty, on the part of the student, as the 
translating and composing of prose and verse 
literature. The passion for the practical in 
American life has encouraged an attitude of half- 
contemptuous condescension toward all forms 
and expression of the ideal which are produced 

209 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

for no ulterior end than their own loveliness. 
And so it has come about that we distrust culture 
and spell it, derisively, with a captial "C." We 
quote, with complacent approbation, the late 
Mr. Godkin's satirical remark, that a university 
of the English type is the ideal place for those 
people who are chiefly interested in lawn-tennis, 
gardening, and true religion. We feel that 
sentiment is womanish; that the expending of 
money on the creating and perpetuating of the 
vision of beauty is to be suspected; and that the 
practical, the accurate, the didactic, and demon- 
strable should represent the aims of the college 
course. 

But most of all have the American colleges 
changed because the American people have so 
changed. There has been an enormous and rapid 
increase in the wealth of the country, brought 
about, not by the exercise of extraordinary in- 
dustry or financial genius on our part, but by the 
unhappy accident which has enabled us ruth- 
lessly to exploit the natural resources of a virgin 
continent. Up to the time of the Civil War we 
were an isolated nation, largely agricultural, cut 
off by the Atlantic Ocean from that ancient 
society and its painfully achieved standards, 
whose early remembrance had begun to fade 
from the minds of the descendants of the colonial 
210 



THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

settlers. Hence with money, and no background, 
with that passionate desire for self-expression in- 
separable from a young and growing nation, but 
no standards to direct and restrain it, America 
blossomed out about 1876 into a tropical luxuri- 
ance of aesthetic horrors. Our domestic dwellings 
were Queen Anne in front, but far from regal 
in the rear. It was hard to say, concerning the 
palaces of our millionaires, whether they in- 
clined, in their opulent magnificence, to the 
standards of early Pullman or late North German 
Lloyd. Ostentatious extravagance, bizarre and 
grotesque decorative expressions, were the order 
of the day. We painted snow-shovels with old 
oaken buckets and set them up in the fireplace. 
We tied up the legs of milking-stools with baby- 
blue satin ribbons; sketched midwinter land- 
scapes upon them, and deposited them in the 
drawing-room, near to the Rogers plaster group 
of the farmers playing checkers on a barrel-head, 
or under the black walnut what-not, covered with 
who knows what in the way of "objects of bigo- 
try and virtue." And then came the influx of 
enormous alien populations, with their peasant 
traditions, their barren and impoverished lives. 
They, too, sharing in the material prosperity and 
social opportunities of the new country, naturally 
set about finding ways to express their ideas of 

211 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

the opulent, the gorgeous, and the grandiose. So 
that America became, and, to a lessening degree, 
still is, a vast experiment station in naive and un- 
conventional aesthetic expression. Nor is it, I 
think, too much to say that the average American 
taste to-day, while it has markedly and rapidly 
improved in the last two decades, represents, for 
the most part, a recrudescence of barbarian de- 
lights and vanities. Take, for instance, our larg- 
est metropolis, New York City. It is not merely 
the wharf of the nation, it is also its chief com- 
munal expression. It is the place to which 
Americans go from all over the continent to 
spend their money; to which we naturally gravi- 
tate in our hours of relaxation, those moments of 
freedom from economic pressure, when we no 
longer do what we have to do in order to earn 
our bread and butter, but what we would like to 
do for our own personal satisfaction. New York 
is, therefore, the great amusement center of the 
continent. And in no way do men more clearly 
reveal their essential aesthetic and ethical charac- 
teristics than in the types of pleasures and 
amusements which they choose for their hours of 
recreation. Hence the picture of the American 
public, as it amuses itself in New York, is no un- 
fair exhibition of its average aesthetic standards. 
That picture focuses in one of the most f ascinat- 

212 



THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

ing and most terrible sights to be seen anywhere 
in the modern world, Broadway at the height of 
the season on a winter's night. There is, indeed, 
a lighted way, brighter than under the sun at 
noonday, its glittering electric signs making every 
appeal that the hawker's genius can suggest to 
human cupidity, vanity, and lust. There are the 
great trams endlessly crashing up and down the 
center of the street, filled to the lowest step of 
their platforms with restless, chattering, volatile 
human beings. On both sides of that lighted way 
are the open doors of the houses of eating and 
drinking; houses of amusement and shame; 
houses where strange and terrible pleasures, 
sweet and secret, and devastating vices, find their 
nightly patrons. In and out of those open 
doors, hour after hour, flows the pleasure-seeking 
crowd like the tides of an unwholesome sea. 
And over all the dust and mist and turmoil, 
rising up out of the scents and perfumes of that 
terrible assembly, is the characteristic cry of our 
age: to have, to hold, to buy; to eat, to drink, 
to feel; to get, to sell, to exploit the world for 
power; to exploit one's self for pleasure — this 
is to live. The same hard and ruthless look, the 
wide-open, iron gaze of the man who knows all 
and has done all, has left untried no horrid 
experiment from which he might derive a new 

213 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

sensation, — that look which Bronzino painted 
into the faces of his Florentines in the days of the 
Medici, — that sinister and unsensitive look is 
in the eyes of many an American to-day. 

Now, all this has profoundly modified the 
college. It has both popularized and vulgarized 
it. Everybody's son attends it to-day, and 
everybody's standard prevails in it, for the under- 
graduate body will never be very much better or 
very much worse than the homes out of which it 
issues. There is nothing, therefore, surprising 
in the fact that, coming from a civilization so 
opulent and so barbaric, so extreme and artificial 
in its forms of amusement, and geared to such 
high nervous tension, the youth who enter the 
college should represent a low level of aesthetic 
development. That they do represent this low 
level is, I think, only too apparent. Certain of 
their widespread habits bear witness to it, habits 
which, entirely aside from the moral obliquity 
which sometimes attaches to them, yet make one 
cringe to speak of. One is under-graduate pro- 
fanity, which is even more a sign of vulgarity 
than it is of illiteracy. Ancient words of vice, 
handed down by word of mouth from genera- 
tion to generation, age-old defamations of the 
Almighty, are inexpressibly detestable when they 
issue from the mouths of youths. That the 

214 



THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

grosser forms of immorality are decidedly lessen- 
ing among undergraduates is the almost universal 
testimony of those who are competent to speak 
on the subject. But some of the worst language 
I have ever listened to, — the most profane, the 
most callously licentious, — I have heard from 
striplings in American colleges. Undergraduate 
profanity deserves very serious attention from us 
all, not merely because of the irreverence which 
it indicates, but because of the absence of im- 
agination and sensitiveness which it reveals. 
Strange to say, it does not always so much indi- 
cate the speaker's spiritual debasement, his reli- 
gious incapacity, as it does the absence in him 
of personal refinement, decent standards, aesthetic 
self-respect. Another witness to this personal 
declension is the quite modern habit of chewing 
gum, the truly frightful spectacle one may see of 
whole platoons of youth watching a ball game 
from the bleachers, and working their jaws in 
unison in a sort of rotary motion, chewing like 
so many cattle the social cud, utterly oblivious 
to the depth of personal commonness to which 
the indulgence sinks them. Another is the lack 
of interest on the part of most undergraduates 
in good music. Their devotion is to trivial 
tunes, written in syncopated measures, known 
as "ragtime." One remembers here the cheap 

215 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

musical show which has long been considered 
the chief piece de resistance for the undergraduate 
in his lighter moments, a show which has neither 
wit nor meaning nor melody, nor anything but 
its direct appeal to the most elemental of all 
the senses to commend it. I think few things 
more clearly indicate the contempt which age 
sometimes has for youth, than the class of amuse- 
ments which it offers them, which it is quite 
confident they will gladly accept, and which, 
alas, they invariably do accept. 

Again, the kinds of interior decoration which 
are devised to lure from your pockets the restless 
pennies indicate the low level of taste to which 
you have fallen. We adorn our rooms with 
flannel banners. We affect two sorts of pictures 
— the audaciously sentimental and the sporting 
virile. The sentimental variety is illustrated in 
the well-known print of a lithe and lissom young 
woman in full, very full, evening-dress, — what 
might be called a noticeable evening-dress, — 
swooning in the arms of a tall and slender youth, 
rather consciously superior in pumps and claw- 
hammer coat, who imprints an impassioned 
salute upon the lady's too- willing lips. The 
manly variety is illustrated in those Renwick 
posters, printed in primary colors, which one sees 
displayed in every college bookstore. They 

216 



THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

represent the Freshman of a vacuous counte- 
nance, blowing smoke-rings like a naughty little 
devil; the Sophomore, with his little cap awry, 
and his exaggerated pup; the "fusser," learning 
his 'Arry and 'Arriette art by practicing on the 
dressmaker's dummy; the Senior, lighting a 
black cigar with his flaming diploma. All these 
travesties of life and nature, indescribably worth- 
less, but quite popular, indicate into what valleys 
of humiliation we have descended. Again, the 
lack of any independent critical judgment on 
your part in literature, your innocent inability 
to recognize excellence except when it is under- 
scored and labeled for your benefit, also indicate 
the same deficiencies. 

I am well aware of the many and the brilliant 
exceptions to all this which every undergraduate 
community offers; of the large number of young 
men who are quick to appreciate and keen to 
analyze both the beautiful and the good in the 
life about them. Yet I think it may fairly be 
said that the average undergraduate is rather an 
obtuse and unawakened creature, only seeing the 
things in the world that he expects to see, usually 
unable, in any given experience, to distinguish 
its salient and characteristic excellencies or to 
perceive its particular defects, possessed of no 
clear or adequate literary and artistic standards* 

217 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

There is, therefore, a very real reason for devoting 
these pages to the discussion of your aesthetic 
problem. And it is a part of your unsophisti- 
cation, your barbarism, that the very word "aes- 
thetic" is repellent in your ears. It connotes to 
you "pink teas," and an attempted transatlantic 
accent, and a general emasculation of life. We 
confound the lovers of the beautiful with those 
men in whom the appreciation of beauty has not 
been balanced or made vigorous by a combina- 
tion with more sturdy but no more normal 
attributes. We think of the dilettante, who is 
the elegant idler in the community, an amateur 
who exploits art, but has no thorough knowledge 
of it or any creative ability. Or we think of the 
sentimentalist, who has a superficial and emo- 
tional appreciation of beauty, without insight 
into its moral aspects, and with neither depth 
nor continuity of feeling in his rapidly shifting 
allegiances. Or we think of the sensationalist, 
who loves beauty because of the physical or 
sensual delights to which it may be made to 
minister, and whom we regard with abhorrence 
and contempt. Therefore, when we meet a man 
of cultivated manner, delicate and sensitive 
feeling, wide and gracious interests, we are apt 
to put upon him the burden of proof of showing 
that all this development of his aesthetic nature 

218 



THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

has not emasculated his person or degraded his 
spirit. 

The first thing we must do, then, is to try to 
understand just what sort of a man the true 
aesthete is. I think of him as one who has a 
quick and eager appreciation of the creative 
spirit, and especially of those expressions of that 
spirit which sum up the sense of goodness and 
of beauty in the world, which record the finest 
emotion, the keenest hungers, the most imagi- 
native conceptions of human life. These things 
interest him quite as much, indeed more, than 
abstract philosophies, or discoveries in natural 
science, or the ingenious application of such dis- 
coveries to practical purposes. This man is an 
idealist. His face is turned towards the future, 
where all our faces should be turned, yet he has a 
keen and loving perception that all our future 
must grow out of the past, that, as some one 
has recently said: "You cannot think of it as 
uncoupled from the rest of time and allowed to 
run wild." Hence he prizes all ancient memo- 
rials of thought and effort as sincere and touch- 
ing expressions of the growing human spirit. He 
is moved by the tone and consecration which 
age imparts. The philistine is scornful of the 
treasures which we have inherited. They appear 
to him out-moded, inconvenient, ridiculous, 

219 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

faded, having little real or monetary value. 
The cultivated man perceives that every inheri- 
tance of truth or beauty, coming out of the past, 
is the proved material from which is to be de- 
veloped the future. It is the prepared ground 
for the garden of beauty that is to be. For all 
such inheritances furnish standards, indicate 
methods, transmit at least the beginnings of 
sane and lovely visions. Hence they dispel 
ignorance, temper extravagant enthusiasm, sub- 
due crude originality, help us to see life clearly 
and to see it whole. In the "Grammar of As- 
sent," Newman has a very beautiful passage, in 
which he refers to this interpretative, illuminat- 
ing office of ancient beauty for the present day. 
"How often," he says, "we read as schoolboys 
some great line of classic verse, or famous bit 
of prose, the product, perhaps, of an Ionian 
festival, or a morning upon the Sabine Hills, 
and it seemed to us mere rhetorical common- 
place. We could not understand why it had 
lived from generation to generation. But then, 
when long years have passed, and we have had 
experience of life, we re-read the ancient couplet 
or the hackneyed paragraph, and they startle 
us with their sad penetration, their vivid exact- 
ness." Through all the varied channels, then, of 
literature, ethics, religion, and all the arts, the 



THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

noblest expressions of the human spirit have 
come down to us from the days that are no more. 
And on these expressions the sensitive and re- 
flective man loves to ponder, and in them all he 
takes a sincere and innocent delight. Now, to 
do this is the very thing which the undergraduate 
needs, because so few of you are reflective beings. 
You accept life, but you don't scrutinize it; you 
take what each day brings, but with no intelli- 
gent valuation. You have few conscious appre- 
ciations, because you know little of the world's 
proved and tested best. You do not hold 
yourselves up against the great achievements 
of the past, letting the eye sink inward and the 
heart lie plain in the light of their beauty. 
Hence the thing that you know least about in 
your undergraduate days is your own selves. 

For the dwelling upon the lovely and gracious 
and beautiful expressions of our human life — • 
the bringing yourself up to them — is like coming 
up to a touchstone, these things reveal you to 
yourself. They expose your deficiencies. They 
awaken your possibilities. Any supreme work 
of art is a mirror in which you view your own 
spiritual lineaments. Acquaintance with old, 
unhappy, far-off things, with the heroes who 
went down scornful before many spears, with 
the music which records, in the sweetness of its 

221 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

strain, the anguish of living, these arouse your 
own heroism, your own sensitive and perceptive 
spirit. To know and ponder how men have 
toiled; what men have suffered; to see the 
dreams of the race incarnated in bronze, spread 
out on canvas, made articulate in prose and 
verse, rising in dim and intricate richness of 
stone, in some Gothic chapel — all this means, 
not emasculation, not sentimentality, but growth 
in sensitiveness, in personal fastidiousness, in 
breadth and intelligence of spirit, in vigor and 
elevation of soul. 

Here, for instance, in the Plaza at Fifty-ninth 
Street, is Saint-Gaudens's group of gilded bronze, 
Sherman astride his stallion, proud, confident, 
determined, Victory, impetuous in triumph, 
sweeping on before. The cultivated man stops 
to fix his eyes in sheer delight upon those metal 
forms. He is not a "poseur or an emotionalist. 
But there he sees the spirit of majesty and honor 
and courage and pride made clear and evident 
to him. It feeds his hungry heart on the gods' 
food, and he goeson his way illumined and 
refreshed. Or one enters one day the Palace 
of the Louvre, and passing through the gorgeous 
gallery of Apollo, comes into the salon carre. 
A small canvas hangs, to his left, upon the wall — 
the portrait of a young man holding a glove. 

222 



THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

The simple dignity, the unconscious modesty of 
youth, is there. The clear and candid gaze, the 
quiet, sober mouth, the whole figure — all is 
instinct with the noble frankness of a princely 
boy. One looks upon that portrait, and tears 
rise in the heart. Ideals and dreams which we 
had thought gone from us forever lift again on 
the far horizon of the mind, remote, but clear, 
like distant towers in a sunset sky. The old 
hungers for the simple, the chivalrous, and the 
true awake, and behold, our youth has been 
returned and we breathe the air of heaven again. 
Thus our love of beauty has refreshed the inner 
man. Or on some lonely day it is borne in upon 
us all over again that life has, oh, quite as much 
sorrow as pleasure, and that our very joys are 
three parts pain. We feel the slings and arrows 
of outrageous fortune; we are tired of forever 
expecting but never receiving. And so we long 
for the blessed human touch, and crave to enter 
deep into the heart of our strange world. And 
then one turns to the great Elizabethan. He 
listens to lago and Othello in their sinister con- 
ference, or hears the whisperings of Juliet as she 
leans over the balcony of her father's house. 
But does one just read cold words, dialogues 
cunningly constructed and built up? Oh, no! 
one does not read at all, but listens to men and 

223 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

women pouring out the glowing, full-throated 
utterance of their passion with unpremeditated 
art. Horror-stricken we see the chamber at 
Cyprus. Softly, we too, walk in the orchard at 
Verona; and in this mystic touch with the un- 
changing heart of our race our lives are comforted 
and composed. 

Thus, then, we gild the prosaic present with 
the grace and poetry of the past. And we do far 
more than that. Thus we renew our own capac- 
ity for vision, and are better able, in our day 
and generation, to play our part and serve 
joyously and courageously our time. Thus our 
personalities are enriched and deepened. There 
is "more" of us, and the more becomes better 
and better. We increase our points of contact 
with the world; we are able, through these 
sympathies, these appreciations, to enter into 
and understand larger and larger areas of human 
aspiration and experience. More life interests 
us, and a versatility of interests besets us as we 
grow older, and the whole of our natures is 
developed under this fine universality of appeal. 
So that, as we return to our several communities, 
we carry back new sources of inspiration, new 
insights into the human spirit, new, chastened, 
significant ways of expressing our own genius, to 
enrich and illumine the life to which we come. 

224 



THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

So this is my final plea as we close these talks 
together. Our American life is restless, filled 
with many trivial and detached activities, arid 
and monotonous in expression, with compara- 
tively few interests and not many subtle or 
precious joys. But chance has given to you, 
its sons, four years, set apart from the roaring 
and the turbulent stream of the world, which 
may be years of quietness and beauty, devoted 
to the deepening and enriching of life, to the dis- 
covery of those values in it which fate can neither 
give nor take away. There is no taint in the 
joy that such a quest will bring. It is admirable 
and necessary to have vigor, initiative, courage, 
self-reliance. I know how you all worship 
virility, and that for which the word appears 
to stand. It is also admirable, and no less 
manly, to have delicacy of temper, vividness and 
quickness of delight, in the presence of perfect 
objects. It is a good practice for American 
youth to ponder on human life, to search for its 
hidden secret in those expressions of it which 
come from the heart of the poet, the painter, the 
sculptor, the maker of churches, the builder of 
stately palaces. It is a good thing for us to 
unite ourselves, by reading and contemplation, 
with these creative and perceptive souls, so 
that our own insights are developed from theirs. 

225 



THE COLLEGE COURSE 

Thus we, too, become responsive to the mood of 
a building, to the delicious play and interplay of 
tone upon a canvas, to the lights and shadows 
of a group, to the modeling of some sculptured 
face; so we, too, feel the inward atmosphere of 
each individual who comes within our notice, 
and know the fingers of his spirit when they 
reach out to ours; so we, too, live in a bright 
and ideal world, whose kingdoms of the spirit, 
which the imagination has conquered for itself, 
become, as Hawthorne said, "a thousandfold 
more real to us than the earth whereon we stamp 
our feet!" All this means a complex and highly 
developed personality. Yet are we not sent to 
college, that of us just such developed and 
educed persons may be made? All this means 
a development of the feminine powers in men. 
But all great men have something of that intui- 
tive insight, that sensitiveness to the psychologi- 
cal climate, and that power to respond wholly 
to a great ideal, which is what we mean by 
feminine attributes. And even as you should 
loathe and hate effeminacy, so should you revere 
and cultivate these fine and subtle and truly 
precious things. 

And then, as life goes on, it will, indeed, take 
much away. Old loves will die, old enthusiasms 
chill, old interests fade. The body will thicken 

226 



THE DISTASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL 

and coarsen, and age, like a wintry shadow, 
creep over your face. The world will pass ever 
swifter and swifter before your eyes; more and 
more it will seem like the vague and insubstantial 
pageant of a dream. But the sense of its mystic 
and imperishable beauty will deepen. Sorrow 
only clarifies that sense, pain and effort form 
the somber background against which it shines 
more clear. Then with every succeeding year 
you will surmount life, not be broken by it, 
because you will not lose your power to respond, 
to leap up and answer to it, to be so moved and 
enthralled by it. Every year it will interest you 
more, and you shall be more within it, less out- 
side of it, feeling yourself a part of its solemn and 
majestic grace. So that at the end you will be 
able to say: 

"I love the brooks that down their channels fret 
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they, 
The innocent brightness of a newborn day is lovely yet; 
The clouds that gather round the setting sun 
To take a sober coloring from an eye 
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality : 
Another race hath been and other palms are won: 
Thanks to the human heart by which we live, 
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears, 
To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



